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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   30481 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 3, 2023

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The proverb that goes "Strong men create good times, good times create weak men, weak men create hard times, hard times create strong men" is almost entirely wrong.

For the purposes of this chunk I've decided to put into its own top-level post, man has two natures. The survivor nature is concerned with enduring and overcoming threats to one's life and one's society. The thriver nature is concerned with extracting value from life.

The ones that are called "strong men", i.e. those in whom the survivor is dominant - they love hard times. That's their element, that's where they're at advantage, and they go cranky and depressed when the environment is not competitive enough for them. Naturally, hard times create strong men, by incentivizing the survivor nature.

Strong men create hard times. It's what one can observe quite clearly anywhere with an abundance of them. It also follows from the incentives - why would they not reproduce the environment that favors them? Most of the time, there are enough other tribes around that much of hard time-creation is aimed at them. However, strong men love hard times so much that they gladly spare some for their own tribe. When the outer enemies run out of juice, those with the survivor dominance that have trouble adjusting turn their attention fully inward. (Recall that tongue-in-cheek alteration that goes "hard times create strong Slavs, strong Slavs create hard times"?)

Weak men create good times. Weak men love good times, and it is often mentioned as a bad thing. (I disagree.) But it is not the survivor who creates good times. Naturally, there are very few people who are fully of one nature, and strong men do create good times, usually for others and sometimes for themselves. But only to the extent that the thriver is present in them.

The thrivers adjust society to be more suited for thriving, to have more good stuff and more time to enjoy it. They do it when there is space for that indulgence. An overabundance of survivors, particularly the inflexible ones, gets in the way of that as much as it might help such a society endure. A society that's comprised fully of pure survivors is the image of boots stamping on human faces, forever. A society that's comprised fully of pure thrivers will dwindle in a few generations.

As someone who puts value primarily in my individual life, I know which one I'd prefer and which one I'd rather not exist at all.

I think there's an extra pole in there. My own model is (and note that these are deliberately twee and modern-vocab terms) Chad, Normie, and Degen. Chads exist as a result of hard times, and are both the stereotypical hard men of the saying, and further them via violence and intra-Chad competition. Normies move hard times to good times as the result of cooperation and coordination. And Degens exploit the social structures of Normies, weakening them to the point where the structure no longer benefits people, and then people either drift away or some combination of environmental pressure and incomnig Chads breaks the organization entirely, you get chaos, the Chads start to thrive, and the cycle begins again. It was noted belowthread that the grand Teutonic war machine lost out to the likes of Audie Murphy and his ilk; that is absolutely the case. It is also the case that, generations later, that ilk lost out utterly to Afgans with AKs and IEDs, both in actual military conflict, and in the battle for hearts and minds.

Basically, you've got a three-pole attractor scenario, a lot like male lizard mating strategies 1. I'm also open to better name suggestions for the three groups, but I feel that the names I picked are evocative enough to justify them.

In this specific type of lizards, you've got monogamous lizards, alpha large-territory-holding lizards, and pass-as-female-to-sneakily-mate-with-the-actual-females lizards. Monogamous lizards get driven out by alphas, alphas get cucked by infiltrators, and infiltrators don't pass well enough to fool monogamous lizards and can't successfully cuck them.

Not that this is any better, but it tracks with the Geeks, MoPs, and Sociopaths framework.

If you're looking for alternate descriptors, I'd use Leaders/Founders/Builders, Followers, and Parasites. Basically one small class of people who can catalyze change, the vast majority of people who follow the first group and by doing so produce surplus value, and third group that does not produce value but instead consumes it.

It was noted belowthread that the grand Teutonic war machine lost out to the likes of Audie Murphy and his ilk; that is absolutely the case

The teutonic war machine didn't lose to Audie Murphy and his ilk.

It lost because it was an industrial war and German war making potential would only have approached that of the US had it conquered and fully repaired the entirety of European industry, from Normandy to the Urals.

It lost because Americans were competent fighters enjoying immense material superiority. Something like 5:1 vs tanks on the western front, and 10:1 in planes, probably at least 4:1 in artillery throw weight.

For more information, see e.g. 'Wages of Destruction' by Adam Tooze.

The only path to win for Germany would have involved defeating the USSR.

It is also the case that, generations later, that ilk lost out utterly to Afgans with AKs and IEDs, both in actual military conflict

This is again bullshit. American military in Afghanistan barely ever lost any battle. Taliban and Afghans in general aren't great fighters, and they had barely any equipment.

Taliban won simply by surviving and disrupting the government, that's all they had to do.

America simply had no viable strategy how to turn Afghanistan into a functioning state. It was never willing to send in enough soldiers - you'd probably have needed a million and then keeping them there for thirty years while creating a fair civil administration and so on.

I vaguely recall reading about a simulation of an iterated trembling-hand Prisoner's Dilemma game set that evolved like this. You'd expect "Tit-for-tat" (let's call it "Copycat", because Nicky Case is awesome) strategy to be the natural winner. But once it's naturally won, in a world full of Copycat players of trembling-hand games it pays to be "Cooperator" instead, because unlike Copycat the always-cooperate strategy doesn't get into nearly-interminable feuds when it or its partner makes a mistake. But when the world then starts to fill up with Cooperator players, it only takes a single always-defect "Cheater" mutant to sweep through the population, so Cheater takes over next. And finally, when the world is full of Cheaters, even a single pair of Copycat has enough of an advantage via mutual cooperation to take over again, and the cycle repeats.

Although, I don't recall that simulation showing any equivalent of the "Copykitten" strategy, which you'd think might be able to short-circuit the Cooperator takeover. I'm not sure whether that's because it just never managed to take over or because the simulated agents didn't have that strategy as an option.

grand Teutonic war machine lost out to the likes of Audie Murphy and his ilk; that is absolutely the case

Seeing this repeated is too much for me. If 'Teutonic war machine' lost to anything American, it was the 1/3rd+ of global industrial output and a continent worth of resources supporting the Europeans - and it was these Europeans that Germans lost out to. List Americans responsible for the massively successful industry, if anyone.

List Americans responsible for the massively successful industry, if anyone.

Rockefeller, Ford, Vanderbilt, Edison, Dow, Carnegie... of all the things to imply America was short on, you picked titans of industry?

EDIT: wait, I think I misread what you were saying. Nevermind...

I did not say America was short on them, I implied the opposite - by 'if anyone' I meant, if you're going to list any individual to represent the forces that were of foremost importance in US success in the two wars.

My own model is (and note that these are deliberately twee and modern-vocab terms) Chad, Normie, and Degen. Chads exist as a result of hard times, and are both the stereotypical hard men of the saying, and further them via violence and intra-Chad competition. Normies move hard times to good times as the result of cooperation and coordination. And Degens exploit the social structures of Normies, weakening them to the point where the structure no longer benefits people, and then people either drift away or some combination of environmental pressure and incomnig Chads breaks the organization entirely, you get chaos, the Chads start to thrive, and the cycle begins again.

This sounds pretty similar to the dicks/pussies/assholes trichotomy popularized by Team America: World Police.

Hard times are darwinistic and kill off weak men. Hard times require group oriented people. Under difficult conditions individual self expression is valued less than the survival of the group.

Group oriented people with strong genetic health create good societies.

Strong socieites allow for more individualism and self centered people. People start avoiding military service, become atheistic, marriage is no longer sacred, immigration increases.

Self centered people create chaos. Andrew Tate-types, Tribes such as the vandals or Mexican drug cartels flurish in this environment. These people party their civilization into hard times.

This reminds me of Ronald Inglehart's Cultural Evolution thesis. He argues that people's social values evolve and are shaped as a function of the extent to which their survival has been established and secured.

One argument essentially takes the position that the values of creativity and self-expression (traditionally associated with liberalism and the left) trump the values of self-preservation and group consensus, only at the point that the group's survival becomes taken for granted. I think that's true. But it's even more instructive for what doesn't get said about that observation. Once you've reached the point where you've taken your survival for granted, you've already made a crucial, civilizational error in your habit of thinking. It reminds me of Lenin's axiom (I'll call it): "Every civilization is three meals away from anarchy." And I think he articulated something that conservatives have known all along. That no matter how technologically advanced, or sophisticated, or well defended your society is, you're never all that far away from the precipice.

And that's where it really illustrates the fundamental flaw in prioritizing creative self-expression, and independent thinking over group-oriented consensus. The latter which has always been necessary historically, to withstand the rigors of intergroup conflict and external threats. Just ask yourself how pathetic it is when questions about transrights (even if you think they're important) have become a top-shelf item of importance, as far as our cultural discussion goes, in the west today. And then just ask yourself, do you think objectively, that issue will (or should) 'ever' become a top-shelf, issue of importance? This is why I think issues and conversations like this are worth spending virtually no social or political capital one. Because they're so unimportant and inconsequential to bigger issues that'll never go away. No matter how much you think you've secured your place in the world.

I think it’s somewhat true that hard times create stronger people. The problem is that in order for human brains to mature properly, they need to have challenges to be met. The thrivers tend toward immaturity, they would rather play games and put forth minimal effort toward useful things.

I mean sure, but on the other hand in some sense the immaturity (play etc.) is a valid purpose of humanity. What else are we striving for with the term "good times" if not a reduction in demand for useful things, leaving more overhead for playing games?

Well, in my view, you do need a balance of both, but if you end up creating a completely “playful” culture, a lot of things don’t happen simply because those things that need to happen are hard and boring. This is a problem both personally and in wider society.

On a personal level, things like getting a job and doing it, cooking and cleaning for yourself are not exactly fun. And things like gaming, internet scrolling, partying and so on are fun. So a lot of people choose the latter. They take minimal jobs if they take one at all and spend the rest of their time playing. They accomplish very little and end up less happy because they haven’t accomplished much. (https://youtube.com/watch?v=DSYjCgXKOXE)

On a more societal level, building things, fixing things and getting along with everyone else is necessary to keep society humming along. Those things are boring. Who wants to pay taxes to fix roads? That’s not very sexy. Who wants to do the hard work of learning advanced math so they can invent and build important things to make society better? Sitting around discussing literature is much more fun. And self control is not as much fun as doing whatever you want and whenever you want to. It just doesn’t work because unless people know what the rules are and that you’ll mostly go along with them, they can’t really cooperate as they’d have to to make society work.

I mean, I agree, but you could imagine a society that was all work, zero play, 16 hours a day until you die. Any money you are paid for your labor is only reinvested to make you a more effective employee. Children are still raised (16 hours of schooling and training per day, enter the labor force at 12), but they refund their parents the cost of raising them and thus are merely another labor-raising device. All fun that one has is optimized for perfect recovery to maximize socially useful labor. I think if we look at why such a society was bad, we find what the proper role of fun is: this society doesn't seem to be for anything aside from itself. Is society for man or is man for society? Whereas from the "fun" perspective, or rather the "human values" perspective, we find that we don't need to justify labor: a life with a balance of meaningful challenges, self-actualization and silly fun seems more preferred, even on its own merits, than a life of only one of them. So there are two arguments for labor: first, a society with only fun quickly runs out of fun overhead. This is an argument that even fun-maximalists will embrace, but it doesn't give you meaning in a post-singularity setting where the amount of labor strictly required for fun maximization is zero. The other is that meaningful labor is fun. (At least, if we stretch the meaning of fun somewhat, to mean "fulfilling".) This offers a blueprint for a post-singularity world of voluntarist labor. And in that model, we may imagine that some people genuinely are most satisfied by a life filled entirely with vapid fun, and so what? Their fun does not diminish mine.

I mean, I agree, but you could imagine a society that was all work, zero play, 16 hours a day until you die.

For most of human history, this has been the case. And the demand for this kind of work hasn't gone away either, just because we live in the modern world. Someone, somewhere, has to do the work. Maybe the work's become more dispersed and technological abstractions have made managing the load easier, but the work itself hasn't disappeared. And a lack of respect for that burden, encouraging people to ignore addressing problems at the expense of their leisure, is only going to exacerbate the problem in the long-run.

Society may not be for anything aside from itself. But for most people, that seems to be good enough when you look at the ways people live their lives. I tend to have much more of a collective view of humanity more than I do an individual one. I struggled with the paradox of thinking through this for a long time. And I still do. Thinking of oneself as an individual is important but it's not paramount, IMO. People live embedded in communities. They live within a context of other human beings that you can never completely and permanently isolate themselves from. Despite being individuals, human beings aren't 'only' individuals. And being an individual may not even be the most important part of being human.

But I don't think this post-singularity world is ever going to come. Everyone on Planet Earth is living on borrowed time that's going to eventually come due.

For most of human history, this has been the case.

Sure, but what's their concept of heaven? More labor? No, a rest from having to do labor all the time. "Not enjoying it and wishing it would stop" is pretty much the defining difference between labor and fun. I don't think anybody's ever invented a wageslave heaven. (Maybe the Chinese...?)

I'm not saying the work shouldn't be done. I'm just drawing a difference between work as an instrumental and terminal goal: in fact, "instrumental goal" is also a pretty good synonym of labor.

People live embedded in communities. They live within a context of other human beings that you can never completely and permanently isolate themselves from.

I mean, I don't think constructing social necessity is particularly hard. If we find we want, terminally, for there to be socially useful labor (even aside how we're pretty alienated from the fruits of our labor in our current society, something something letterbombs), I don't think that's going to be hard to arrange even in the absence of any true environmentally-imposed scarcity. But note that now we're looking at labor as a terminal goal. So that's what I'd argue: all non-terminal labor should be abolished - not in the sense of just not doing it, but in the sense of not having to do it.

For most of human history, this has been the case.

I see no rational basis for believing this to be true. Current hunter-gatherers are not a 1/1 replica of our paleolithic ancestors, but they seem a reasonable approximation and do not lack for play or leisure. From all available evidence, farming and herding, even the primitive varieties, include a considerable amount of play and leisure. Quite a few slaves in Rome enjoyed some level of play and leisure; slaves who did not, mine and galley slaves for instance, stand out as famous exceptions.

Just a raw evolutionary argument should nix this: if all previous generations had actually operated in this fashion, wouldn't you be fairly-well adapted to handle such circumstances with equanimity?

Do you have examples of societies where strong men created hard times? And an explanation of how good times somehow emerged from the perpetual cycle of hard times -> strong men -> hard times?

Stalin was an example of who I described as survivor-dominant type, and by all accounts times under him were pretty hard both in the heart of USSR and its periphery, only exceeded by even harder times Hitler decided to bring east.

Fortunately, strongman leaders tend to croak, and that is how the cycle can weaken.

As someone who puts value primarily in my individual life, I know which one I'd prefer and which one I'd rather not exist at all.

This is an interesting philosophy, but here's where you lose me. Do you want society to dwindle? Because that's what you think happens when strong men don't exist at all.

Is this something you came up with on your own? I have never heard society explained this way before, so I assume it is, but it does feel like it has some value as a perspective, and I have a really strong sense of deja vu about it. Or it's more like it feels like an unstated assumption underpinning many aspects of modern society.

To clarify: if having to choose between two extremes, I'd prefer no future rather than boot future.

Is this something you came up with on your own?

I'll resist the urge to ask "does anyone really come up with anything on their own" and say this isn't directly based on me analysing some philosophical movement or author. I've had an argument on the motte and wanted to solidify my objections into a separate post.

Life is hard. Some people are shielded from this but just by looking at nature, we can see how savage it can be.

I'd never want to the ones that I love through the hardships I went through. This can create a generation that underestimates how hard life can be.

Weak men create good times. Weak men love good times ...

Strong men like good times too. Here's the thing, there are times when life gets hard, that someone has to act. Weak men tend to fail here. This makes for bad times.

Go to a construction site, how many weak men do you see?

Strong men like good times too.

As I said, pretty much no one embodies the pure archetype. But from what I observe, the more someone valorizes being able to act when life is hard, the more they valorize shunning pleasures, sometimes to the extent of fetishizing suffering. Not a 1:1 correlation, but certainly not orthogonal.

The failure mode of tough construction site man is "I had/have it hard so y'all should too". This is what I'm attempting to expose and warn against in my post.

But from what I observe, the more someone valorizes being able to act when life is hard, the more they valorize shunning pleasures, sometimes to the extent of fetishizing suffering.

You should examine your biases.

The failure mode of tough construction site man ...

You misunderstood me. Please, go work on a construction site for a few months. Learn what it takes to actually build something. Learn what that strength actually means because judging from your observations, you're rather ignorant.

The failure mode of tough construction site man is "I had/have it hard so y'all should too".

Whether this is a failure mode or not depends on the specific details of "having it hard." Making your children exercise every day is being harder on them than letting them lounge around on the couch watching cartoons, but the outcome is better; making your children exercise until they throw up or pass out from heatstroke is being too hard on them. There can't be any universal rules at this level of abstraction because people's definitions of hardness are conditional and based on their own experiences; some tiger parents need to be told to take it easy and some parents who are spoiling their kids should be encouraged to be more strict.

As an aside, for an example of a culture whose members took shunning pleasures to the extreme but was nevertheless quite successful, look no further than Puritan New England, which banned everything from music to sports but also produced an outsized number of great scientific and literary figures. I've even heard it speculated that New Englanders had a longer life expectancy than all their colonial neighbors because their food was so bland that people inadvertently practiced the sort of calorie restriction that leads to longevity in laboratory mice.

Strong men create hard times. It's what one can observe quite clearly anywhere with an abundance of them.

What, the Rome of 200 BC was less functional than the Rome of 300 AD? When Rome was run by really tough, martially inclined men like Scipio Africanus, Marius, Sulla, Pompey and Julius Caesar, they had more than their fair share of wars and civil wars. But they pulled on through! Rome reached the peak of its power, destroyed its peers, grew faster than ever before. They routinely thrashed barbarian migrations - they were the ones 'migrating' into Gaul and elsewhere.

In contrast, the later Roman Empire was run by weak men who totally lacked the Cannae spirit of 'ban weeping, field new armies, fight on to victory' and they got obliterated. They resorted to paying tribute to barbarians, hiring barbarians to do their fighting for them and hiding behind the (admittedly strong) walls of Constantinople. They were passive, reactive not proactive.

Hard times come after weak men take control. Take Russia - was Gorbachev a strong man? No, he was weak. He wasn't in control of the transformation he tried to undertake. Thus the disaster of the 1990s and disintegration of the USSR (which blows anything Putin's done out of the water). Likewise with Nicholas II for that matter. If Nicholas were a strong man, Stalin would've been executed, not given tiny prison sentences. The guy was a revolutionary, a rioter who organized deadly prison breaks and violent bank robberies!

Now, this is not to say that strong men only bring good things. Hitler and Napoleon were about as far on the 'strong' axis as you can get. Things did not go so well for France and Germany under their rule. Yet there's a wider range of outcomes you can get under strong men than weak men. You can have great success as well as great failure. Under weak men, all you get is decline and eventually disaster.

Too many weak men create space for disaster, but who brings it and perpetuates it? You said it yourself: the barbarians or Stalin do.

The barbarians didn't bring disaster to themselves, it was great being a Frank or a Goth or a Vandal, as opposed to being a Roman. Likewise, you did not want to be a Gaul when Julius Caesar was running around.

Stalin is mixed. On the one hand his economic management and wartime leadership leave much to be desired. But on the other hand, he did win and Russia became a superpower. Could Gorbachev have built such a powerful war machine from the mess that Stalin inherited? Or would he have disintegrated the Union and let Germany eat it for breakfast?

That eventually in your last sentence is load bearing.

Rome's decadence and decline took roughly the entire period we think of as modernity, longer in parts of the East. Gorbachev of course came out of the hard times, even moreso Andropov and Brezhnev.

Without a predictable period to the cycle, the gag just becomes Reversion towards the mean: the musical.

Well, disaster is really contingent on external forces and on how resilient the system is. Rome didn't face many strong external threats until the great migrations of the 5th century because they'd already destroyed Carthage, Pontus, Macedonia, Gaul and only had to deal with Parthia. Plus Constantinople is incredibly defensible.

Under Brezhnev, the USSR was stable. Brezhnev didn't hesitate to use force either, he was definitely a strong man: send dissidents to mental institutions, send tanks into Czechoslovakia. The economic problems with the Soviet Union under Brezhnev and afterwards were definitely solvable with some judiciously executed reforms, as we see from China. Reducing the military budget below 15% of GDP would've been a good start!

All I'm saying is 'Strong men cause a range of outcomes, weak men cause hard times', which is pretty intuitive. I don't even have anything to say about cycles, just that, contra OP, strong men aren't necessarily bad but weak men are.

I wouldn't say they're bad per se, rather that they're a stabilizing agent. If there were only strong men, there would be no society at all, as there wouldn't be enough of the type who mindlessly upholds status quo. Too many however, and no necessary advancement and adaptation can occur.

They're the stabilizing rods of the great nuclear reaction we call society. Too few and it explodes, too many and you choke out the necessary chain reactions.

Why can't strong men uphold the status quo? See pic related. Notwithstanding spelling errors or stereotypes, surely it paints a picture of a tough, patriotic, disciplined, brave man (a strong man). In contrast we have a lazy, timid, pacifist (a weak man). Now these are just archetypes, yet there are surely people who more or less match them. I'm willing to bet the Romans who made Rome great were more like the former, Caesar, Marius and so on, leading from the front, risking all for glory and victory. The Romans who made Rome weak were probably more like the latter - the Empire somehow stopped being able to field huge armies, they had to pay for foreigners to fight for them.

There could well be a status quo that revolves around strength, a status quo that rewards bravery and great deeds. Strong men would fit fine in that.

/images/16886265479896488.webp

Well strong men 'do' uphold the status quo. At least for a given time. Will Durant had a useful heuristic of historical thinking, when he said that, "A nation is born Stoic and dies Epicurean." Good conditions have an inherent quality sewn into the environment that allows idiots and weak men to proliferate, at times it seems, with no end in sight. Until eventually the load becomes too heavy, the pendulum swings back and a historical reversion to the mean takes place. And that's usually how it's been, throughout history.

Civilizations tend not to make course corrections. When they're caught in a negative feedback loop/death spiral, history hasn't suggested that they find themselves a way out of it. They die, and they die hard. Going against the weight of that is no task for mere mortals. Which is the 'why' I'd suggest to you, as to why they can't uphold the status quo indefinitely. One thing Jared Diamond suggested in his historical/geographic determinist view of history that I think is highly relevant, was the question he raised about whether or not societies can change their values. If you want a relevant example where that question becomes important, just look at declining fertility rates all across the world.

I just came across this thread today on Reddit. Which is a great exemplar of this problem. The article isn't as relevant as the comment section, if you can notice how many people are politically blocked (evidenced by Reddit's overwhelming leftist userbase) from noticing the elephant in the corner. If you keep scrolling, a few people noticed it, about midway to the bottom of the thread, and some of them got jumped on for their 'right'-leaning suggestions of an explanation; and why the typical economic explanations are bunk. The reflexive tendency to jump on and attack and dismiss the 'real' source of the problem, are why civilizations broadly speaking, don't recover. And it's why strong men can't uphold them or reverse direction. Because the people overwhelmingly are not allowed to think about the problem, in a way that will allow a correction. And the longer the problem goes on, the worse it gets. And the worse it gets, the more extreme the solutions become. And the more extreme the solutions become, the more unacceptable they are to the population. And then you die.

Good post, agree. I hope people will realize we've been doing things wrong when it becomes more obvious, as economies fail and wars are lost. Like they said about the Soviet Union, 'it was forever, until it was no more'. If not, death is also an automatic stabilizer, the future will belong to those who do things correctly.

Speculation, but I find it suggestive: Strong men increase variation, weak men reduce it. ("Strong men explore, weak men exploit"?) So when things are going bad, you want a certain level of strong men to have a chance to hit a fix; when things are going about as good as can be expected, you want to reduce your strongman:weakman ratio to avoid breaking things. Such a model would also result in the observed men/times cycle if you selected for successful countries.

Phrased like that it sounds suspiciously like "thrive vs survive", which would fit with the "right = strong, left = weak" framing.

Is the reason America is so successful that it's got good strongman selection mechanisms via the presidency?

Is the reason America is so successful that it's got good strongman selection mechanisms

Possibly. Our success is mostly due to economic output (compare the different nations' military production during WW2, for example), and though our "may the best man win" economy isn't perfect, it's a lot better than "may the best man be chosen by the Ministry of Best Man Allocation and carefully follow the List of Best Man Best Practices".

via the presidency?

Not possibly. Have you seen our presidents?

Up to and including bush senior the majority were extraordinary men. After that the weak men entered the stage.

Obama's considered a great President by a good number of people, despite being a fairly 'weak' leader. Hard to tell how history will look back on him a century from now.

That seems entirely dependent on the trajectory our culture takes from now until then.

Does progressivism continue? Then he'll be considered great.

Do we collapse and rebuild? He'll be on the level of James Buchanan.

How muc( of that is geography though? We live in a very stable part of the globe, protected by oceans and friendly neighbors in Canada and Mexico. Americans live in a fortress so long as her navy and air force can keep people from actually landing on our shores.

Of course, if you consider the president whose reign probably most contributed to America's status as the undisputed global champion - FDR - he was a polio-ridden college boy who, at least according to various sources I've seen, was considered bit of an unserious airhead by many "serious" politicians and other types around him - ie. FDR. The only reason why he would be considered a "strong man" was that he succeeded, which means that the cause and effect get mixed up.

Czar Nicholas II is remembered as a weak leader, but if the chips had fallen slightly differently at the start of WW1, he might be remembered as the man who crushed Germany and Austria, took over Constantinople and was one of the greatest Czars ever.

It strikes me that "society attempts to engineer strong men to create/maintain good times" would be an interesting fiction writing prompt. It seems plausible that this could encounter all sorts of pitfalls and ironic outcomes. But I'm sure some authors have already considered this idea ("service guarantees citizenship"), if not head-on. Artificially inducing hard times seems ethically fraught, and seems likely to backfire when discovered. But I'm not much of a fiction writer.

EDIT: I guess Ender's Game largely fits this description, as well.

Starship Troopers is literally that.

That was the source of the "service guarantees citizenship" quote. :)

The Dune series is essentially an extended argument for this position. In fact, Dune makes a stronger point: without war, humanity would go extinct. Too much order (read: good times) lead to decay and death.

Why do people who insist on criticizing the idea of cyclical history always go for the short political slogan version instead of the longform nuanced theories that inspire those political slogans?

A lot of this post seems to stem from arbitrary definitions being held onto a very incomplete understanding of this theory, which is a shame given that people have taken decades to write compelling and detailed explanations of how and why the cycles happen, what they look like, how transition between them look like, and what the quality of the people at any given point of a cycle are.

To boil it all down to strong and weak is appropriate for a political slogan, it is not appropriate for anything beyond that, and certainly not any actual theory of history. If you want to disagree that history is cyclical you can make arguments as to that, and I believe there are strong arguments against (though I am ultimately not moved by them), but argue against Spengler or Khaldun, not some strawman naive palingeneticism even they would deride.

I even think you have a compelling insight in trying to map the survive-thrive axis to Spirit, Asabiyyah, Nomos of whatever quality of organization cyclical theorists use, but actually do that please, don't just map it to some naive (mis)understanding.

Why do people who insist on criticizing the idea of cyclical history always go for the short political slogan version instead of the longform nuanced theories that inspire those political slogans?

but argue against Spengler or Khaldun

Well, I admit - I haven't read those guys, but I've read enough iterations of the political slogan and what were essentially its naive expansions. So I argue against the slogan.

I think the saying is more meme than fact. And a lot of it is just mean reversion. Pre-Roman empire it was likely that randomly one of the many tribes would get excessively lucky with a group of good leaders. They conquor the med. And in good times after luckily having great leaders mean reversion was likely to average leaders. Also Rome lasted for a thousand years. A simple roll of the dice would eventually lead to a string of bad management at the wrong time.

I forget exactly what was in Taleb’s “Fooled by Randomness” but this meme seems to be based on taking meaning from essentially randomness in leader selection.

Now I’m a big believer in psychic history (Foundation series) so while things like Rome existing I believe in I don’t necessarily think it had to be the Rome we know. Maybe Carthage had better leaders and they conquored the med instead.

For mean reversion think about say Shaq’s son or Jordan’s son. Both played basketball and even college ball but neither are as good as their dad. That’s mean reversion. That’s not this meme.

Now I’m a big believer in psychic history (Foundation series)

Psychohistory?

I think this sort of argument almost always becomes a debate over what exactly the terms "strong men," "good times," etc. mean, but I wanted to bring up one of the better meditations I've read on the topic that agrees with your perspective, namely Bred Devereaux's four part series of posts on what he calls the "Fremen Mirage."

Personally, I'm a bit closer to Ibn Khaldun, in that I've observed degeneration at all scales of biology as soon as selective pressure is released, from yeast in a test tube losing whatever useful (to us) gene you try to insert in them whenever it stops being necessary to survive, to 2nd and 3rd generation immigrants losing the work ethic and conscientiousness that their parents or grandparents honed while toiling away to escape grinding poverty in Asia.

I tend to think of it like a spring that can be coiled and released i.e. all the valuable work comes from the release, not the compression, but it also resets you back to the initial conditions or worse after you let it go. What would be truly great is if we could achieve the advantages of so-called "hard times" or what I call "compression" without actual hardship, whether that's through some sort of mental conditioning, strong enough cultural memes, or direct genetic engineering.

I was going to link Devereaux myself, but I felt OP's post was too crap to bother with haha. Using such vague terminology and just-so stories is akin to calling over all your Motte buddies to look at Rorschach blots, and any useful commentary is despite such a thing.

Your spring metaphor reminds me of a fair amount of literature on athletic performance: everyone agrees that training makes you stronger, but not immediately. Asking folks who just finished a marathon to run another immediately -- but faster now because they've trained more -- is not going to go well. You actually get stronger when resting after training. But rest too long and you start to lose form.

Sports science has figured out all sorts of (imperfect) models for human performance. Generally best results come from periodizing training and recovery to optimize fitness in competition, rather than year-round.

I think your idea generalizes "strong" here to include more than athletic feats. But even accepting that model doesn't make it easy: motivation for self-improvement purely for stoic self-actualization -- thanks, Maslow! -- doesn't in my experience work that well. I try (and do okay, I think) but my greatest efforts and successes in life have had non-actualization driving factors.

Even if we assume it would work -- of which I'm not certain -- it's unclear to me how we'd encourage this at a population level. There have been plenty of pop culture books that have tried, but getting people to clean their room, or even exercise modestly and eat healthier, seems to prove quite difficult for the average human wealthy enough to have a choice in the matter.

In the course of deconstructing the argument, you have thrown out whatever meaning there was to its constituent words.

At the risk of sounding pedantic, I believe the original thesis refers to some combination of Darwinism and Turchin's overproduction of elites. It entirely embraces your claim that weak men love to have a good time. Surprise, everyone does. And your «strong men» of the bodybuilders-on-horseback mold are a bugbear, a mirage, a nightmare of confused Hollywood producers and Bay Area rationalists and wannabe "dark elves" – they do not matter and do not last, they are but foam cresting waves of history.

Is Putin a weak man? Are folks on Rublyovka weak, or their children in Western capitals? They've delivered a pretty hard time for everyone, but they sure love to live large. And what about the self-satisfied rich of the developing world, that @2rafa discusses? Are they dedicated to making the whole system more amenable to thriving, or do they find it easy to insulate their kin from the wretched masses and keep having a good time, for their time?

The adage is almost nonsense, but so is your perspective.

I'd say that good men create good times. Good men like the memorable LKY. Good in that they care at all about what happens outside their circle of immediate concern, and strong enough to make hard decisions; which some mistake for them being bad.

In good times, this error becomes more pervasive, as social mobility reaches certain sophistication and a subclass of (some would say, overproduced) elites discovers the utility of playing up those decisions' costs.

I don't think I agree with your implicit definition of "Strength".

When is Achilles displaying more strength? When he kills Hector and abuses his corpse, or when he accedes to King Priam's request for leave to bury his son? Is a man who can defeat any challenger but cannot rule himself, who remains a slave to his passions truly "Strong"?

You assert that "thrivers" "adjust society" toward thrive conditions. You assert that "weak" men like good times, which seems fair enough. How does their "weakness" contribute to good times, specifically, beyond creating a demand that the less-weak can fill?

You're trading off between "strong/weak" and "thrive/survive" as though they're synonyms. They aren't, and further "thrive" and "survive" seems on a much weaker foundation than "strong" and "weak". The latter we can observe from objective results. The former, from what I've seen, is a model built on the present, and thus assumes its own conclusion, that what we see around us is in fact "thriving", a self-sustaining flowering that can run under its own power in the long-term.

I am not using "strong" here as a positive adjective.

obviously. Likewise, I can assert that "sick" is actually better than "well", but there's no obvious reason why others should take that assertion seriously. See the edits above for more detail.

The "weak" and "strong" for the purposes of this model relate specifically to the ability to do what is required for base survival. Many men that might be called weak are not useless just because their current skillset would be useless in a harder time. It's also important to note that the ratio of survivor/thriver in a man is not fixed for life.

The "weak" and "strong" for the purposes of this model relate specifically to the ability to do what is required for base survival.

Yes, but that is an interpretation you are importing from "thrive/survive". That is not the understanding of the person who coined the phrase, nor of the people who repeat it, and you haven't demonstrated why they should, only asserted that they should.

You are claiming that "strength" is nothing but raw animalistic survival potential, and that "weakness" is everything else, and then announce that there are many good things other than raw animalistic survival potential, and so therefore "weakness" is better than "strength". This is obviously true, for what it's worth, but I doubt anyone worth listening to has ever argued otherwise. The question remains of whether "survive/strength" reduces down to nothing more than raw animalistic survival (it certainly does not) and whether "thriving" can actually self-sustain such that "survive" is no longer necessary and can be discarded. Is "thrive" simply a rebranding of "eat your seed corn"? Aesop's grasshoppers "thrived" for a time, and a number of human polities have as well, up until they neglected a few too many things and then died screaming. History strongly indicates that there's no free lunch, that sooner or later the constraints of material reality must be accounted with. The fact that the Thrivers themselves have more or less wholesale begun adopting Survive tools like censorship and enforced conformity kinda paints a bleak picture for the future of Thrive, but hey, as every sucker ever proclaimed: maybe this time really is different!

and whether "thriving" can actually self-sustain such that "survive" is no longer necessary and can be discarded. Is "thrive" simply a rebranding of "eat your seed corn"?

I thought I was rather clear that both extremes are not ideal. Eating your seed corn is the extreme of what I call thrive here.

I don't think the artist is alt-right, but I do think there is an interesting parallel with Nazi propaganda... take this 1932 propaganda poster titled The Negro-isation of France in 100 years, captioned "the last non-colored French form the main attraction of the Paris Zoo"- there's a similar aesthetic with Peterson with the predatory black figures looming over the white people. This Nazi poster and Peterson's work are both interesting to review in context with the current race riots in France, although I do not for a second believe Peterson has the same interpretation of this as the Nazis.

Yes, it's a pretty funny and thought-provoking image really. Black people in it represent competent, essentially Western population, the neo-French (despite crude physiognomy); the legacy French are reduced to smug monkeys thoughtlessly going through the motions, grooming in their effete manner. Unpleasant as it might be for some, it's very different from your average modern day HBD-informed racist's idea that White people are superior on account of their cognitive capacity and affinity for civilized behavior; that they basically deserve higher status for some contingent merits. Assuming that Blacks surpass whites in those regards, would that image even feel bad for an average believer in the République? Or would he go «eh, why not»?

I wonder how we should understand the author's intent and conception of good and evil.

your average modern day HBD-informed racist's idea that White people are superior on account of their cognitive capacity and affinity for civilized behavior; that they basically deserve higher status for some contingent merits.

I don't think this is what HBD racists are saying. And if they are saying this, it is because they are trying to distract themselves from the underlying issue, which is that smaller weaker people are afraid on a physical material level of bigger stronger people who are more prone to aggression and violence. Whites and Asians don't "deserve" higher status on contingent merits because they're smarter, whites and Asians "deserve" higher status in society because when you get in the woods the strongest man wins. It's better to try to live in a world where we can have nicer things than simply a brute force competition, all the time, because then you don't have society, you just have the horror of nature which is the very thing society is trying to protect us from to begin with.

Whites are about as big and strong as Blacks and bigger and stronger than Arabs (e.g. Algerians in France), pervasive cuckold fantasies about muh barbarian vigor notwithstanding. This is evident from racial composition in the upper rungs of combat sports.

Asians really are worse off though.

(Freedom of speech.jpg)

It seems pretty obvious from observation of sport that Whites and Blacks are bad units of analysis.

The average of all whites and all Blacks is meaningless, all the outlier athletes come from small sub populations.

Asians really are worse off though.

Kung-fucels in tatters right now. Even as a distant observer, it's funny how the harsh objective crucible of MMA has deflated the mystique of traditional Asian martial arts.

Would MMA allow all the techniques taught in Kung Fu though? I don't think so.

I don't know enough to comment, but I was under the impression that pretty much anything goes in MMA except for kicking the balls and scratching out eyes and biting. Could very well be wrong!

More comments

The marginal techniques like eye gouging, finger breaking, blows to the back of the head, soccer kicks to the head of a downed opponent, etc. Do nothing to prove hypothetical kung fu superiority.

The better fighter will be in a better position to gouge your eyes and to prevent his from being gouged.

Traditional tai-chi masters are indeed in shambles from MMA.

On the other hand, Muay Thai has been proven to be effective fighting style (excuse the dramatic narrator).

This video is of showbox in 1988 between the top American Kickboxer and a Muay Thai fighter using limited rules preventing elbowing, throwing, grabs, and limiting below-waist hits to a low kick. The kickboxer gets kicked in the leg so many times he starts dodging and running around at 5:50, and ends up carried away in a stretcher.

MMA rules allow lowkicks and elbows in some positions. Fighters study techniques derived from Muay Thai, along with other lineages like Greco-roman wrestling and Juijitsu. And "MMA style" is just whatever works in the ring's rules.

Quoting https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/07/25/how-the-west-was-won/

An analogy: naturopaths like to use the term “western medicine” to refer to the evidence-based medicine of drugs and surgeries you would get at your local hospital. They contrast this with traditional Chinese medicine and Ayurvedic medicine, which it has somewhat replaced, apparently a symptom of the “westernization” of Chinese and Indian societies.

But “western medicine” is just medicine that works. It happens to be western because the West had a technological head start, and so discovered most of the medicine that works first. But there’s nothing culturally western about it; there’s nothing Christian or Greco-Roman about using penicillin to deal with a bacterial infection. Indeed, “western medicine” replaced the traditional medicine of Europe – Hippocrates’ four humors – before it started threatening the traditional medicines of China or India. So-called “western medicine” is an inhuman perfect construct from beyond the void, summoned by Westerners, which ate traditional Western medicine first and is now proceeding to eat the rest of the world.

One could say that the European far-right of the 1930s feared humiliation primarily in front of other Europeans, whereas those of the 2020s fear destitution and powerlessness at the hands of the other. The first is about a kind of racial cuckolding (maybe literally, given Nazi obsession with the 'rhineland bastards' etc), the second is the direct fear of becoming destitute, irrelevant, or a victimized minority. I do think a lot of European ethnat rhetoric is strongly influenced by postcolonial Said type discourse and by the experiences of decolonization.

Interesting when it comes to the history of German racial relations is the Reichstag's interracial marriage debate of 1912. They legalized it (or kept it legal, rather) in part because the social democrats showed the parliament photographs of pretty native Pacific Islander and Southwest African girls and even the centrists agreed they were as attractive as German women, and therefore acceptable.

They legalized it (or kept it legal, rather) in part because the social democrats showed the parliament photographs of pretty native Pacific Islander and Southwest African girls and even the centrists agreed they were as attractive as German women, and therefore acceptable.

These are the real conversations we need to be having.

As an aside I'm currently reading a more recent-ish history of the Bounty mutiny and am being reminded at how devastating Pacific Islander women are to the underpinnings of European civilization.

In general I have a very low opinion of any piece of commentary that consists of "look at how much they hate you/us". You see it in a much more mainstream way on the US left re. certain recent SCOTUS decisions too. It's an embarrassing way to act, a facile way of trying to drum up rage and aggression and to radicalize your side. Hatred is not uncommon in politics, but it seems to me that it is often less of a motivation than the opposing faction expects.

I once had an internet argument with someone who argued that Mugabe's land expropriation had been motivated by a hatred of whites. I replied that having done quite a bit of business in Zimbabwe, including with white Zimbabweans who still run many major corporations and are quite prominent in business in Harare, I didn't think that seemed to be the case, and had never noticed much racial animus toward whites by blacks in the country. White farm owners were targeted because they were a small minority that owned a lot of land the government wanted to redistribute to veteran soldiers to try to avoid a civil war; whites were the unfortunate victims of that policy. I don't think most ordinary Germans hated Jews in 1939, even though my grandmother and her parents fled the Holocaust and many members of my extended family died in it; in her mid-90s today, she doesn't have any hatred for Germans and enjoyed speaking German on her many vacations there and to Switzerland.

'They hate us, so I will hate them' is the eternally flawed flipside to the 'mistake theory' fallacy, where everyone in the world is just a temporarily embarrassed western liberal with the same ideals but different views on execution. In truth, they usually don't hate you, they're just different to you. And they'll screw you over to save themselves, which is unfortunately true of almost all people, individually and in groups.

they're just different to you

Did you mean to say that they're indifferent?

And they'll screw you over to save themselves, which is unfortunately true of almost all people, individually and in groups.

White people in shambles, bless their hearts 🙏. What negative in-group preference does to a mf. But since they've been nothing but nice to me, I return the favor by doing my best to warn them about the non model minorities, while not biting the hand that feeds.

I don’t have negative in-group preference at all, I just think that outright hatred is less common as political motivation than people think. I also think that ‘mistake theory’ is broadly wrong (and generally vaguely western supremacist, for what it’s worth), but I think a comprehensive understanding of ‘conflict theory’ suggests that conflict is usually a result of expediency rather than hatred.

I did mean difference.

Different peoples have different cultures, identities, interests. They are usually fine with others as long as their own interests are not threatened. This is the best and most full argument against immigration (and one I agree with). But hatred is too strong a conclusion to draw from it. Difference is enough.

I replied that having done quite a bit of business in Zimbabwe, including with white Zimbabweans who still run many major corporations and are quite prominent in business in Harare, I didn't think that seemed to be the case, and had never noticed much racial animus toward whites by blacks in the country.

...and did they counter-argue the pretty obvious selection bias given your context and who you were working with specifically, i.e. the surviving winners and those who had monetary incentives to put you at ease?

I don't think your argument supports what you think it does. The point of 'the collective hates [X]' isn't that every member of the collective shares the same vibe of the group, an objection which itself would be a form of fallacy, but that the group effects is dominated by those who do. Most ordinary Germans may well not have hated Jews in 1939, but they were also onboard with a regime that absolutely did, hence why so much of German post-war political identity had to confront the 'I wasn't directly involved, and thus not my issue' collective identify in order to rehabilite a collective German political identity.

Likewise, the successful surviving white business men you met who were willing to work amiably with you may not have had significant expeirences with those who shared a regime stance... but the white businessmen were, by definition, the survivors who made accommodations and allies and friendships with/within the regime to protect themselves. The ones who didn't- the ones who would have been dispossesed out of spite- wouldn't still be in business for you to deal with.

The point is that Mugabe was more like Carl Schmitt than he was like Hitler. Many whites, including an extremely racist Australian I know who met him and knew him quite well, think he didn’t hate white people. Mugabe did not act against whites for the entire first 20 years of his presidency. And I think, by the way, that my theory is borne out in practice. The far right, as linked by OP, believe American blacks - by and large - have a deep and unrelenting hatred for American whites. Do you agree? I don’t. I don’t think most black Americans care much at all about American whites. That, and nothing more, was my point.

What in your estimation is the percent of black Americans have white people?

The point is that Mugabe was more like Carl Schmitt than he was like Hitler.

Well, obviously, but the scope of people who have both the animosity and the means to attempt genocide are very narrow. This is a bar so low the only reason it's not a tripping hazard is the straw.

The point you were challenged on was that you weren't in a position to hear the contrary experiences of others who might have differed from your business partners, who had financial incentives to assure you that you could make good money with/for them.

Many whites, including an extremely racist Australian I know who met him and knew him quite well, think he didn’t hate white people.

You're conflating the individual for the group, which was the same error with your Nazi metaphor. Just as members at the bottom of a faction may not share the vehemence of a faction, but it's still fair to characterize the faction in a way, this is also true for the people at the top of a faction. Leaders may not believe a certain narrative, but can also be comfortable co-existing with it / leveraging the people who do / the general complicity of not challenging an unjust system they partake of.

Mugabe did not act against whites for the entire first 20 years of his presidency.

Aside from not really being relevant to changes over time (Mugabe not having static policies over 30 years implies he had changing opinions, not that he never had certain opinions), the first 20 years of Mugabe's presidency were more or less the American unipolar/western hyper-power period, which included multiple American interventions in Africa, while the last 10 years coincided with both the post-American/western low of the financial crisis and pre-ISIS/post-Iraq... both of which offered opportunity and basis for movements to arise blaming nebulous white-west types as scapegoats.

And I think, by the way, that my theory is borne out in practice. The far right, as linked by OP, believe American blacks - by and large - have a deep and unrelenting hatred for American whites. Do you agree? I don’t.

Am I expected to deny the OP before or after I deny beating my spouse?

I don’t think most black Americans care much at all about American whites. That, and nothing more, was my point.

And your supporting argument of personal experiences in Zimbabwe don't support this point, and was not immune to challenge on grounds of you self-selecting the narratives that would deny an issue if there had been one.

People whose jobs it is to convince white people, or people with many white bosses and coworkers, to invest money in a place are typically not going to tell said white people that their money is more likely to be stolen on account of them being white.

He doesn't need to personally hate white people in order for them to be a convenient whipping boy -- see, uh -- J Edgar Hoover springs to mind?

But if somebody acts as though they hate you for other reasons, is it really worth parsing out the difference between the people who actually hate you and the ones that are only pretending to be retarded racist?

Yeah, this is an interesting one. What was that Scott Alexander concept, a scissor statement?

The artist seems to generally give a huge range of his figures the same kind of face no matter what role they are playing in the paintings.

Both his Mueller and his Trump in this one have the same kind of eyes and mouth as the supposed savage blacks in the other paintings, which makes it less likely that the black figures in the other ones are supposed to be ethnic Africans.

The black figures here and here pretty clearly are meant to be representations of an American police state, not of virtuous ethnic Africans.

Then there's stuff like this where aggressors and victimized look the same.

Ancient Greek vase painting, with its sharp outlines, exaggerated human figures, and black/red/white color fills, has a heavy influence on his stuff. Of course he might be using the colors racially, but as I have pointed out above, this is far from clear.

His attacks on America and his hatred of Trump and cops are not necessarily signs of any sort of extreme leftism. All those are common attitudes among people ranging from boomer liberals to libertarians. In our political climate, they of course code left, but there are ten million fairly moderate boomer Hillary voters who share those opinions yet are not some sort of frothing antifa members.

Cleon Peterson is a leftist creep and makes it plainly obvious in his work. If you saw his 'art' on the wall of someone's house, you would immediately assume they're part of some villainous organization, or that they want to look like a villain.

Go look through his Artsy page: https://www.artsy.net/artist/cleon-peterson

It's pretty clear he hates the USA (Destroy America), Donald Trump (Stop the Virus, Useless Idiot and about 1/10th of his portfolio), racists (Practice Intolerance). There's not an apolitical bone in his body. I challenge anyone to tell me that they've looked through 4 or 5 pages of his work and believe he could be altright.

Say I made a painting of a long-nosed, weaselly, greasy, fat, lecherous bastard clutching onto coins being hung from a lamp-post by some stern-faced Teutonic workers - people would quite reasonably assume it was aimed against Jews and that I was a Nazi. I might protest that it was really about destroying the values of greed with hard work - that it was just timeless symbolism. Yet it's pretty obvious that it's not just about that. Images have meaning. Ideas have meaning.

If you make a bunch of paintings about brutish, Uruk-Hai looking blacks slaughtering whites, then people are going to make perfectly reasonable assumptions about the implied meaning, based on context and the clear slant of the artist.

Is this to say that you actually believe the interpretation in OP's first link, that is, that the artist (1) intended the literal racial interpretation and (2) believes that such a future is desirable? The "Uruk-Hai looking" figures are intended as the protagonists? Can you think of any historical example where a political group depicted themselves or their allies in such a fashion, without the slightest connotation of righteousness, beauty or heroism, or do you believe that your outgroup is actually the most morally and aesthetically alien group of humans to have existed on the historical record?

that the artist (1) intended the literal racial interpretation and (2) believes that such a future is desirable?

Well he couldn't possibly have missed it, it's pretty damn obvious. Contra OP's suggestion that Mr Peterson is apolitical, he's clearly aware of and makes obvious use of political imagery. A quick glance through his portfolio reveals that. A quick glance at the titles of his paintings reveals that.

Motte: Timeless representation of power dynamics and authoritarian violence with caustic debauchery in a revealing display of...

Bailey/What's In Front of Your Lying Eyes: Destroy America, kill Trump, kill racists, the police are oppressive, democracy is a joke, orgies of violence with the strong and obvious implication of whites being killed en masse.

Context is key. If you look at someone's portfolio and just see stuff like this then sure, you could say he might be far right. There is that whole day of the rope meme after all: https://www.artsy.net/artwork/cleon-peterson-absolute-power-7

Or if his portfolio is all stuff like this then sure, he might be a centrist: https://www.artsy.net/artwork/cleon-peterson-what-have-we-lost

But that's not predominantly what Mr Peterson produces, I've looked through his work and it's pretty clear! Didn't you have to go through English in secondary education, where they'd teach you how to find hidden meaning from far less obvious texts. Robert Frost's Fire and Ice for instance, I was taught that it actually had reference to future world wars which might be fought over hot emotions like desire, or stem from a chilling lack of care for the plight of others, that inaction might doom the world. People read in ridiculously far to hidden meaning in poems and art, yet we're not allowed to take what's immediately obvious from Mr Peterson's portfolio? It all but drips malevolence.

Can you think of any historical example where a political group depicted themselves or their allies in such a fashion, without the slightest connotation of righteousness, beauty or heroism

I can think of many actually. It's a very common thing in warfare and other pursuits where it's in your interest to be seen as a savage with no regard for decency.

If you want a recent one consider Russians depicting themselves as Orks. If you want an older one, consider Pirates.

But interestingly in the particular example we're seeing here (modern leftist ideological art), there is an ideological reason for it, which is the explicit deconstruction of those things you list: beauty, righteousness and heroism. Those are all oppressive norms of whiteness that must be abolished. And instead we must "center" "ugly bodies" and "black bodies".

Is this to say that you actually believe the interpretation in OP's first link, that is, that the artist (1) intended the literal racial interpretation and (2) believes that such a future is desirable? The "Uruk-Hai looking" figures are intended as the protagonists?

I don't believe they're intended as the protagonists per se. You were looking for a historical example, so let's look at some ancient Roman art - https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/80/Tunisia-3363_-_Amphitheatre_Spectacle.jpg

People making art like this are not identifying with the beast - the protagonist is actually the observer, who is seeing a savage animal painfully kill, torture and degrade their enemies. Cleon himself isn't actually black either, which isn't what you would expect if the black figures were meant to be the protagonists as you describe... but it does match up with the reading that these white figures are his outgroup, and his art is just glorifying the dispossession, dismemberment and raping of his outgroup in the manner that he believes they would find the most distressing.

As far as I can tell the original video is no longer online.

An unofficial reupload on youtube exists. I wonder if Europeans were similarly offended when they discovered that people in African and Asian art look more like natives than Europeans.

it's a peculiar sort of chauvinism.

And given the apparent racial overtones of the art, who’s to say that Peterson isn’t a rather extreme member of the Alt-Right, rather than a progressive leftist, and is trying to depict blacks as vicious barbarians that must either be evicted or destroyed?

Contra

I'm not going to dispute that Peterson is a leftist,

From here it looks like you were either purposely trying to deceive people here, or are so stupid and incompetent that you cannot be bothered to spend ten seconds looking at an artist's body of work before trying to write intelligently about the topic. I don't want either of those to be the case so I'd really like to hear a good explanation for why you think this is acceptable behaviour in a conversation (not trying to backseat mod or anything, but if somebody did this to me in a real conversation I'd be seriously offended and want to stop talking to them).

From here it looks like you were either purposely trying to deceive people here, or are so stupid and incompetent that you cannot be bothered to spend ten seconds looking at an artist's body of work before trying to write intelligently about the topic.

"I don't want either of those to be the case" is not enough of a disclaimer for throwing a line like this. Please be less antagonistic even if you think someone is being disingenuous.

I don't understand why the great grandparent post of the chain did not already invite a moderator response. Do you consider referring to public figures as "(outgroup) creep[s]" to be within the rules, conducive to maintaining a good tone of debate here or at all inviting (outgroup) to participate, or do you think there are some extenuating circumstances here that justify it in this particular case? As childish as the impulse is, I'm really finding myself wishing I could go around referring to moderately respected figures on the other side as "rightist creeps" until I find out directly, but I presume that the only thing that would happen would be downvotes and outpourings of organic hostility that would make any modhat warnings on top of them superfluous in broadcasting how one is now okay around here but not the other.

Would you be bothered if Ranger had just called him a regular creep and a shitty, hateful artist, rather than specifying the group identification of the creepiness?

I would consider it bad, but not bad in a way that specifically infringes on the goals of this forum like the political group qualification does. Similarly, it surely would make a difference if someone were called a "Jewish creep" (and probably draw much more mod attention, as they still seem to be interested in keeping the forum from pushing away anyone outside of the "JQ right").

Trump

I don't think those are good either, but well. It's already been the case for quite a while that the more intellectual right wingers want to lower Trump's status so as to move on to a better strategy, explaining why organic opposition to anti-Trump posting is lower. Finally, the group identifier really is doing a lot of work. (Compare calling Epstein a "creep" to calling him a "Jewish creep".)

One is just denigrating the person; the other one is suggesting that the imputed negative qualities are related to, characteristic of or even a consequence of being a member of the group in question.

Do you consider referring to public figures as "(outgroup) creep[s]" to be within the rules, conducive to maintaining a good tone of debate here or at all inviting (outgroup) to participate, or do you think there are some extenuating circumstances here that justify it in this particular case?

Generally speaking, we'd prefer people not just throw insults, but public figures are more or less fair game as long as there is some substance to the post and not just ranting about how much you hate Trump or Biden or Cleon Petersen. But yes, if you were complaining about, say, right-wing media and called Matt Walsh a "fascist creep," you'd probably get downvoted, but you would not be modded for that alone.

Ugh. I don't think this is a good interpretation of the rules (and I think I explained in a parallel post why I think that). Allowing this sort of insult adds nothing to the discourse, raises the temperature and very likely turns away people in a way that reinforces any existing ideological slant as it simply allows dominant majorities to assert their dominance. Maybe this is wishful thinking on my part but I think we used to be much stricter about that sort of thing, which, yes, resulted in a constant low rumble of discontent -- but it's not like even CWR, which embodied the "we will not stifle your ability to express your righteous feelings" approach and predictably listed right until it capsized for it, didn't have the same amount of malcontents for whom even the little rules that were still enforced were too much.

On that matter, how would you feel about "Jewish creeps"? (I'm now noticing to my dismay that my phone's predictive keyboard app has already learned to suggest the second after the first thanks to this subthread.)

Ugh. I don't think this is a good interpretation of the rules

If you can persuade Zorba we should crack down on insulting public figures, we'll do that, but generally speaking, we've never modded someone just for being mean to celebrities and politicians. Only if their entire post is a screed about Person I Hate or general booing. Frankly, I am not willing to go through an election season trying to enforce "charity" towards all political candidates. "Trump is a big orange fat-ass!" is a pretty easy comment to mod because it's low effort and inflammatory for no good purpose, but IIRC you (or someone else) wanted me to mod someone for calling Kamala Harris a "weak candidate." Come on.

On that matter, how would you feel about "Jewish creeps"

The rules against making derogatory generalizations about a broad group of people (which includes posters here) covers that.

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The original comment presents an argument for why the paintings can be perceived through either a far left or far right lens.

This argument exists because you are being deceptive about the artist behind them. You actively called him "apolitical" - again, you were actively lying in order to bolster your argument, in the same way I would be if I took one of those dumb Trump NFTs depicting him as a superhero and said "Oh, we can't really be sure of the original artist's beliefs - you could interpret this from a left wing OR right wing perspective!".

However, in both comments, what I'm saying is that's it's irrelevant what Peterson actually believes

You were the one who claimed that he was apolitical, so you very clearly thought that what he believed was actually relevant, otherwise you would not have brought it up.

(and for the record I don't think his intention is to depict black people slaughtering white people because he hates whites or something

My reading is that this work is as shallow as it appears to be on the surface - a depiction of his outgroup (right wing/flyover white people) being humiliated and tortured in the way that he thinks they would find most distressing (racial violence from THEIR outgroup). When you look at the piece in the context of the rest of his work, the most obvious interpretation seems all the stronger to make.

You might want to look at a broader range of his stuff. See what I wrote here. He is certainly not apolitical, but I do not think that the idea that his work is meant to depict "his outgroup (right wing/flyover white people) being humiliated and tortured in the way that he thinks they would find most distressing (racial violence from THEIR outgroup)" holds up.

Plato would likely argue that an intellectualized interpretation of art should have no influence on whether art is permissible. The purpose of art is to better the mind and soul of the median viewer, the citizen. If the art fails to do this, it ought to be banned. The public viewer is not going to over-intellectualize the art, but come away with an essentially intuitive understanding of what is happening. Peterson’s art is degenerate, and has no good in it whatsoever for a citizen of Plato’s Republic, for these reasons:

  1. The viewer just saw an ugly and violent scene, but with no practical and memorable warning to his own conduct, and with no cathartic release of emotion. In other words, the scene promotes stress but with no prosocial or beneficial emotion or consequent. So, you’ve just made a common person stressed for no reason.

  2. Not only have you wantonly stressed the viewer, but you’ve done this when he has expected something quite the opposite, and you’ve taken the spot of something that could otherwise have been very beneficial to the median citizen.

I find the question of what is beneficial and what is degenerate art easy to answer, it just requiews reasoning about the implications of the exposure. Let’s consider It’s a Wonderful Life. It’s a stressful movie with some tragic elements, but the stresses act as a warning to your practical conduct in world affairs. This will increase the chance of living a wonderful life in the future. Let’s consider the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus. A true tragedy with a fate of everlasting torture! What could be the benefit? Well, to induce a beneficial fear. Let’s consider a Clockwork Orange. Does it condone violence? Yes, and perhaps it does this too well — but it asks the viewer the important question of whether we ought to modify behavior using top-down conditioning (apropos!). How about, hmm, a Wes Anderson movie? If there are beautiful shots and scenes that sooth a person and inspire someone to live a more wholesome life, it is good. And so on. What would be banned? A show like Ozark that is a kind of “stress porn” stimulator but with no discernible practical takeaway to your life. A show like Kardashian’s which reduces sum total happiness among women. Fast and Furious movies. And so on.

The Peterson work they picked to go underneath the eifel tower is not one of the violent ones. It's based on some 1400's Italian book where a lovers kiss wakes someone from eternal slumber. If you don't project ideas of racialized dominance on the stylized white and black figures it's a sort of romantic piece with people dancing around the central couple.

The violent ones are shown in galleries to precisely the sort of person likely to develop an overly intellectual view of art.

I increasingly believe that politics, rather most people's political views, is mostly just a function of culture. It's all just a function of the cultural lens. Perspective and values don't make a distinction between the political and cultural realm. Every generation is characterized by a specific dominant cultural lens that is unique in a. what it identifies to be a problem and b. the solutions it prescribes as a response to those problems (generally just meaning the ideal state of existence, which is generally just the inverse of what the state created by the problems is, so ultimately just meaning the norms that are implied and advocated for by the cultural lens). Political views are simply just the attempt at constructing the reality that culture upholds as the ideal; culture is the architect and politics is the builder. That's why when you consume entertainment, comedy in particular, from previous generations it isn't as enjoyable: because culture, which entertainment plays a key role in (in terms of its ability to convey and construct norms), is highly contextual.

But every generation thinks they have arrived at the correct perception of things, and as a corollary they have arrived at the correct view of how things should be. But when this perspective is implemented it always falls short and its shortcomings are evidenced by the fact that the implementation doesn't achieve what its supporters expect for it to achieve. That is what moves thought: the dialectic, the implementation of the counterpoint that reveals the excesses of the counterpoint which eventually necessitates a reversion to a midpoint that seeks to preserve the merit of both the status quo and the counterpoint. It's this constant movement through the dialectic that forces thought and perception to evolve, which is itself powered by shifting perspectives which are rooted in realizing the limited merit of the previously implemented perspective but also that the world which is being perceived is constantly changing (i.e. there are two types of movement: movement within the dialectic and movement of the centerpoint of the dialectic, or what substance the dialectic framework is meant to address). I often wonder if the world had just stopped changing, would we have eventually arrived at a perspective that was objectively supreme, correct, and accepted? Would thousands of years of evolution of thought, with its ability to shape the subject of evolution slowly to be a perfect response to that which it is evolving in response to, eventually have brought us to a cultural lens that is a perfect understanding of how the world is and should be, and, further, would it have eventually brought us to a world that is objectively perfect? But I guess to get back to the point the reason I think we never arrive at that perfect solution is that the focus of this dialectic movement is changing. It's like you're constructing a car optimized to drive on roads, but the roads keep changing.

The civil rights law imposed the frankly retarded[see image, it's a page from James Burnham's book on his experiences in NYC academia in 1930s] culture of 'some' whites -in this case nominally Christian east coast new yorkers on the entirety of the United States.

Yes, politics is downstream of culture, but political power allows a culture to impose itself on others.

It's incorrect to say 'politics' is purely downstream from culture. The culture of the US was irreversibly made worse by the Civil Rights Act which allowed activists to use the political power of the federal government to change culture throught the country.

/images/16884140806204338.webp

From the 1964 "Suicide of the West" by James Burnham. Which ends with this black pill:

If a decisive change comes, if the contraction of the past fifty years should cease and be reversed, then the ideology of liberalism, deprived of its primary function, will fade away, like those feverish dreams of the ill man who, passing the crisis of his disease, finds he is not dying after all. There are a few small signs, here and there, that liberalism may already have started fading. Perhaps this book is one of them.

How’s that working out for him?

I’d be interested in reading more about how that book held up.

I would argue that both are often preceded by philosophy. Why do we believe that equality is even a social good, or that the common man should ever have a voice? For tens of thousands of years prior to the enlightenment, the very idea was mocked. You were born into a social position and there you stayed. It was simply expected that if you were the child of a king that alone gave you legitimacy as the ruler of your people. If you were the child of a peasant farmer, it was a waste to teach you to read because you were destined to be a farmer on some lord’s land. Nobody ever thought about it or if they did, they came to the conclusion that this simply should be.

Likewise we understand the universe in a rational empirical way. For most of human history, it wasn’t so. The universe was run by some kind of spirits and that’s why things are as they are. That tower fell? God caused it.

And later on politics tries to enact things that philosophy has taught. We believe in equality, so we better do something because it’s not happening on its own.

You were born into a social position and there you stayed.

I believe social mobility by and large hasn't changed much, or at all between the middle ages and now.

I suspect you've been psyopped by 'the Enlightenment', the age responsible for many myths such as 'medieval Europeans thought the Earth was flat', 'people didn't wash in the middle ages' etc.

The universe was run by some kind of spirits

Did Aristotle think so? I don't believe that to be true. So it's unlikely that such was a common belief among educated people in Europe in the past 2000 years.

For tens of thousands of years prior

Hunter gatherers and such were and are very egalitarian.

It was the increase in population density and states that created any inequality in status. So, at most there may have been ~6000 years of people living in agricultural societies, most of which weren't really that unequal being really primitive.

There is a level lower than culture: material reality. Unlike less intelligent beings, humans can adapt quickly to a new ecosystem by learning traits that are advantageous in that ecosystem. We don't have to wait for multiple generations for small changes in behaviour, we can develop a culture in a company in a matter of weeks. A national culture can evolve in centuries, while the corresponding differences would take at least three orders of magnitude longer if they were genetic.

Culture changes as the ecosystem changes and new cultural adaptations arise. These changes can be due to cultural changes as well as the material reality changing. Much of the cultural change we have seen in the past decades has happened in the parts of the world that consume the most oil. The social upheaval of the past century is less grounded in cultural innovation and more grounded in the ecosystem being fundamentally altered by fossil fuels. Hyperindividualism makes sense when mortality salients are largely gone. When there is enough material excess for people not to have to rely on social networks in order to get by the selection becomes a function of standing out in the crowd.

The Afghan culture is a function of small groups of isolated people trying to survive in a resource constrained environment.

Climates change, resources become more or less scarce, pandemics, wars and other factors will change the ecosystem. I do agree with human cultural change being a major driving factor but the world around us has changed profoundly.

if you re read the second paragraph I think you’ll see we agree that it’s a combo of cultural and external change

This appears to be a straight copy-paste of the following article:

https://caffeineandphilosophy.com/2017/05/15/the-violent-artwork-of-cleon-peterson/

Written by "C.B. Robertson" on May 15, 2017.

This author has clearly never considered that this minimalist and highly symbolic artwork (by the commenter’s own admission) might not be depicting the different colors of people literally. The black men and the white men may or may not be blacks and whites; they could very well be the darker halves and lighter halves of a shared human nature ... What this means for the cultural Platonists is that even if we are not libertarians (as I am not), we still ought to act as if we are civic libertarians on most matters that fall outside our realm of expertise, and even some matters that we do know a fair deal about.

A friend of mine is hugely into art, has an MFA and has worked at NYC galleries. We were touring some galleries once, looking at some modern art sculpture that some high concept title and description on it ... but it kind of looked like poop. I asked him, "Do you think the artist knows it looks like poop?" He replied: "Of course, that's part of the game." And then later I pointed out one that looked phallic, and my friend said "of course the artist intended that."

The grug brain / midwit / topwit meme really comes to mind here...

Modern artists seem to be addicted to trolling. Telling people who point out the obvious, intuitive message of some piece of art that they have a dirty mind and they are simply not sophisticated enough is part of the trolling. I don't think the artist is propagandizing in favor of white genocide -- but rather he is probably getting a private chuckle from watching all the sophisticated, effete, white male art critics who will praise the artwork and its "symoblisms of unity" while studiously avoiding saying the blatantly obvious.

There is no reason to reward this trolling with display in public areas. As /u/coffee_enjoyer points out, this "art" does not educate us, does not spiritually uplift us, does not display some amazing abilities of craftsmanship so there is no reason to give it any respect at all. The mural should be replaced by something better.

I lost all faith in the interpretation of 'art' by others due to this sort of trolling. It just ceased to be worth my time beyond my own personal judgment and enjoyment.

For a personal anecdote, the first time I came across this idea of trolling was when an artist friend of mine was trying to get funding for an orchestra to play the Jaws theme at one of the most popular beaches in our city as part of a larger display. Once you've seen behind the curtain, it's impossible to unsee it.

Seems like a lot of words to say very little. You needed 1069 words to say Australians wanted to be white untill 1960?

"This will be the first in a five part series on Jewish influence on Austrlian immigration policy."

You can stop at one part, buddy.

Although I cannot find the link (@2rafa's Google fu is apparently better than mine), this certainly looks like something copypasted from Kevin MacDonald, complete with citations of his own works.

I'll give you an opportunity to convince me otherwise or explain yourself, otherwise you are looking at a ban for bad-faith engagement. (You are allowed to link and quote people, you are not allowed to copy an entire essay from elsewhere and pretend it's yours, just to test for reactions.)

Imo you should delete first and ask questions later, he’s abusing your charity with his alts. He wants eyeballs for far right blogs, and you’re cooperating with a defectbot. I don’t understand why banning SS and hoff is even on the agenda, when this guy is constantly flooding the forum unprompted, and just far far worse.

We will never satisfy everyone, between those who want us to ban first and ask questions later, and those who think we should never ban anyone without absolute proof of wrongdoing.

I don’t understand why banning SS and hoff is even on the agenda

No one has suggested banning Hoff.

I thought Hlynka was too trigger happy too (still think he was, most of the time). I don't support bans generally, but this is a clear-cut case.

You asked for proof this entire OP was quoting a blog, you got it. You asked him to explain himself, he didn't. And it appears his other post on peterson was also copy-pasted.

He's used up all the benefit of the doubt he's entitled to. Treat him as guilty and let him appeal if it's some insane coincidence.

You asked for proof this entire OP was quoting a blog, you got it. You asked him to explain himself, he didn't. And it appears his other post on peterson was also copy-pasted.

Dude, give us a minute. I am not going to make a snap decision ten minutes after I post the warning.

I think you should delete the comment, it's a bad look, it takes up space in the thread, and it's a clear troll and a sign that people who violate the rules blatantly and repeatedly can have their trolling stay up.

I'd likewise prefer to see this thread deleted and the poster banned. Copy-pasting someone else's essays is low-effort by definition, and they're clearly making a habit of it. Leaving the post up gives them a limited win, and I see no benefit to allowing them to see their strategy rewarded.

As always, though, I defer to the judgement of the mods.

link: https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2018/10/01/the-war-on-white-australia-a-case-study-in-the-culture-of-critique-part-1-of-5/

quotes around the entire thing for exact matches are good for trying to find a source for a verbatim sentence

Thanks. I tried the quotes thing but for some reason didn't get that hit.

From my experience working in a job where the use of the quotes feature was vital: Google will randomly and without warning place users into experimental variations of their features as a form of A/B testing. If you get placed in the "Google prioritizes words in quotes" user bucket and not the "Google demands exact string match of words in quote" bucket, your search won't turn up the exact results and you're just out of luck.

I managed to escalate this issue quite high into Google support at one point, and the above was more or less everything they told me. Was quite stressful when I needed the exact match for my job.

Do you not get the option for verbatim mode, or does it not work for you? It's buried in there for me, but if I do a search, I get a little "Tools" button below and to the right of the search bar, and then from there I can switch from "All Results" to "Verbatim", where "Verbatim" actually respects quotes still.

If they're removing even that escape hatch I think it's time for me to find a new search engine.

Admittedly it's been years since my experience with it, but I don't recall that being an option at the time. Could've just missed it though. Thank you for mentioning it, it'll likely help me out in the future.

deleted

Now unlike the above, this is merely "something I read somewhere at some point" and not official, but:

I've read that it's worse than that. They've frequently messed around with search function, and how they evaluate the changes is how many searches a user makes. I.e, if you type in a search, immediately find what you need, and leave Google, that's bad, while you search 4 or 5 times to get Google to finally show what you wanted, that's good.

The A/B testing is specifically trying to make the experience worse for users.

They've frequently messed around with search function, and how they evaluate the changes is how many searches a user makes. I.e, if you type in a search, immediately find what you need, and leave Google, that's bad, while you search 4 or 5 times to get Google to finally show what you wanted, that's good.

I was not in search quality, but that would not match my experience at Google. The idea was to return a useful result, not to keep the user searching.

Good to know, and I'll take your word for it over random-poster-on-other-forum.

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The only thing I've encountered in this vein lately is that their bot-detection algorithm seems to interpret "many searches for slightly different search terms in rapid-ish succession" as bot behaviour, resulting in a captcha -- which kind of adds insult to injury when one is trying to nudge the algo to stop serving an infinite selection of (bot-generated?) obvious clickfarm results as the first page...

You could have just posted the article and talked about why it’s interesting in the OP

I'm removing this comment. I am writing this reply but I don't actually know if this reply will still be visible after I remove this comment; I apologize in advance for whatever problems that creates!

The comment I am removing was recognized as uncredited copypasta by users. If the mod team had immediately recognized it as such, we may have removed the comment more quickly, as uncredited copypasta is a form of spam. But we had to verify, and there was some inter-moderator discussion going on.

I remind everyone that while our default position is not to remove comments--and certainly not to censor debate or stifle discussion of difficult topics--some users are not interested in discussion, as Zorba talks about in the latest META post. Sometimes it's hard to know who these users are. Sometimes we make bad calls as moderators. I apologize in advance if that's what I'm doing now.

But I admit, for the moment, that I doubt it. I'm also perma-banning the user for spam at least until such time as I am persuaded that they are not, in fact, just a spammer.

Just copy-pasting articles from Kevin MacDonald's blog in 2018 (Google said it might originally have been from a site called 'Expel The Parasite' although it was reposted by the 'Occidental Observer'), or anyone really (especially without attribution) isn't acceptable on this board, sorry. I suggest that you take your ban and, instead of making another alt this time, think carefully about how you might actually contribute to this forum in future.

Anyone have any inside information on the riots in France? Are they de-escalating yet? From the outside it seems hard to find undigested information.

It certainly looks like the riots are dying down (the number of arrests per night have gone down), but this impression may also be an effect of the government leaning on the media (this is a tried and tested method in order to limit competition between different suburban groups).

The government is also testing the waters for possibly imposing a black out on social media, I assume in part to encourage social media companies to self censor incitement to riots.

There might be flare-ups though in case of deadly shootings, or also on Bastille day next week. Some people were asking last week: why don't they start shooting? I guess that shooting makes a few people dead, but a whole lot of people very angry.

For the moment, the situation appears to be one of exhaustion in many relevant groups. The easy targets have been looted, and looters caught in the act have been sentenced immediately and harshly. Finally, messing with the police is much less fun if your mum is angry with you because she now has to walk much longer to find a supermarket that hasn't been looted or burnt down.

It is also an easy way to limit unapproved narratives that are damaging to the current government and support the out of power party (parties).

The next election is four years away, it’s less of a problem than if this had happened two years ago.

All the better to get the precedents sorted out now, so you have them ready when you really need them.

Is that falsifiable?

Macron can call another legislative election whenever now that a year has passed though, right? I was kind of assuming he planned to do that right at the year mark to get out of the minority but I guess coming right after the pension protests no one expects he’d win.

I saw on observation on Twitter that even the worst riots have about a five day lifespan. Watts, Newark, Rodney King, and so forth would all burn out as the rioters basically got tired of rioting. Something with staying power beyond that would be something worth worrying may become more than a riot.

That casts the 2020 riots in a different light. While most of the individual riots didn't have staying power, a few did. The assaults on the federal courthouse in Portland happened every night for about three months. CHAZ/CHOP lasted about three weeks.

And the Gilets Jaunes unrest in France lasted much longer than five days.

Unlike this, those had concrete political aims. They fizzled once those got too vague to maintain, but here the only goal is basically a sanctionned chaos. There is no reason to keep burning things once the fun is over.

Potentially lockdown conditions caused more of a pentup energy/less access to other activities that'd otherwise serve as a natural distraction.

Also my understanding of 2020 was that a lot of rioters weren't even necessarily local to the areas they were rioting in, which surely would contribute to the ability to stay focused.

Potentially lockdown conditions caused more of a pentup energy/less access to other activities that'd otherwise serve as a natural distraction.

France saw the closest thing the world got to a general uprising against lockdowns in it's colonies.

Anyone remembers (or even heard of) the Insidious? The supernatural series that hasn't made one good movie since the original, like most horror/slasher flicks since the 80s? Well, they just released another movie, one that I didn't even know existed until I went to watch Across the Spiderverse with a friend last night. And guess what, despite the teetering reputation and C+ reviews on Cinema Score, it managed to become a commercial success and knocked the Indy Jones finale with a much bigger domestic box office opening.

This fad has been going on for years but (to me, at least) it never stops being remarkable how big tentpole entries that raked hundreds of millions in the past just manage to fall flat. These franchises tend to be somewhat bulletproof, there's more room for failure and these brands usually wouldn't take a hit due to a few bad entries. Yet, here we are. It seems like Indiana Jones Dial of Destiny might not make back its PRODUCTION budget, let alone break even, that's just out the window. How do you get handed the keys to the most beloved IP's there are, with passionate fandoms falling over themselves to rain cash on you for merch, something that's effectively been a cultural icon for decades, and turn it into a hot pile of steaming crap that no one wants to get 10 yards within? They could make the Crystal Skull (which still raked good money btw) and get away with it. Now, all of a sudden, DoD is the final nail in the coffin.

Every time we pointed out the warning signals, the /r/IndianaJones circlejerk simply kept dismissing us as bigots still continue to defend it like it's some misunderstood masterpiece and the only ones who hate it are incels that can't handle strong women. It's the same theme every single time. We knew Disney was BS'ing nostalgia when it brought back Palpatine, not coming up with something "daring and creative". It hasn't been a full year since RoP, the excuses went from "they've only revealed the casting, we haven't even gotten a first look yet" --> "it's not even out yet, you've just seen the trailer" --> "you've seen one episode, how can you gauge anything from it" --> "most shows don't get good until the 2nd or 3rd season, give it a chance!" You just can't win here. It turns out exactly as terrible or even worse than what we'd expected, to the point where the brand name gets reduced to the same tier as any other obscure brand like Insidious. Yet, we always have the very same passionate circlejerk defending these movies on every fandom on social media. Nor will we ever see Kathleen Kennedy lose her job. I used to think it was plausible it was a grand conspiracy to fuck over the middle class by subverting our culture and values, then I thought it was just Hanlon's Razor, now I'm not even sure.

I mean, this isn't really that unusual. Horror movies are low-status even compared to schlock like Indiana Jones, but they always make very good box office returns for low budgets, which is why there are like ten Insidious movies.

It's not really obvious to me that the failure of this latest offering really has anything to do with Woke, either. Crystal Skull didn't flop, but it wasn't a smash hit and it burned a lot of the goodwill the series had. And now? Most young people don't know Indiana Jones or care about him.

Most young people don't know Indiana Jones or care about him.

Most young people's PARENTS would care, so you can bet that the gamble here was that these parents would make their kids watch the originals, which are of course enthralling, and then drag the kids to the theater so they could hook them on sequels with new characters into the future, thus sustaining the series as a possible ongoing franchise.

I'm not an Indiana Jones fan, but I have a fair bit of nostalgia for the original trilogy, particularly Temple of Doom (I think because I thought the aesthetic was super cool when I was a kid). Having heard nothing much about it other than a couple people in my Twitter feed saying that DoD was going to be terrible, I decided to go to DoD at the suggestion of some friends that I was visiting over the weekend. We had a good time! I don't know if I just had my expectations super low, had the experience enhanced by a bit of a buzz (apparently some theaters bring you a beer in your seat, which is pretty nice), or just wanted to watch a corny movie with some friends, but I enjoyed it decently well.

For the people that hate it, what's the perspective? I'm not trying to be sardonic, I genuinely don't know what pissed them off about it so much. I thought watching octogenarian Indy might suck, but I thought they handled that reasonably well. The whole thing seemed pretty fun to me.

I think for casual viewers it'll be a "yeah, that was okay" experience, but I don't think they'll go out of their way to go see it rather than another movie. And for the fans, there's been enough talk already that they probably have their minds made up about it.

I tried to dissuade my mom from watching it because she's a Ford fangirl, and I heard the movie primarily dunked on him.

Imagine my surprise when she said she liked it, but she has exceedingly poor taste in movie, liking most Marvel slop well past when it was at least a fresh kind of slop.

I heard the movie primarily dunked on him.

If I believe the rumour sites, there was a lot of re-writing and re-shooting because the dunking on Indy played so badly with preview audiences, so they toned it down a heap for the theatrical release version. Critical reviews seem to say there's a lot of action scenes, with opinion divided so far as I can tell between "new director handles these well" and "new director doesn't get the hang of it".

I'm open to watching it now, tickets are cheap enough, and my girlfriend wants to do something other than lie in bed (but I'm perfectly happy doing so!).

The IDOL seems to be the opposite effect where it’s hated by the online types but I loved and seems like a lot of other people loved. It broke too many rules of the online left and was attacked. Showed a violent black man, a manipulative women with rape fantasy’s, false rape accusation at the one moral character in the show.

Begs the question about astroturfing/bots. In this case Disney would have a very strong incentive to have positive “conversation” happening about the movie and has the means available. I have no evidence this is happening but to me it would make total sense as apart of the massive marketing spend.

Every time we pointed out the warning signals, the /r/IndianaJones circlejerk simply kept dismissing us as bigots still continue to defend it like it's some misunderstood masterpiece and the only ones who hate it are incels that can't handle strong women. It's the same theme every single time.

So how do we know that these are actual fans? I.e. How do we know that these people aren't online activists just claiming to be fans? Dare I say that there might be people making money of the fact that shilling the movie to actual fans, that Disney have their own 50 Cent army sitting in /r/IndianaJones?

I remember back in the day that there was this whole thing about how "fans gatekeeping fandoms is a bad thing!" as a part of the culture war. But gatekeeping served a purpose in my view and it is shame that good fans bought into the reasoning of not gatekeeping anymore do their own detriment.

Yeah I do have suspicions many of these spaces are being astroturfed, the fanbase for these IPs are big and passionate enough to usually allow a bad entry to succeed, only slightly less. As for gatekeeping, we've long since accepted that it needs to return. We threw open the gates for those who wish to subvert the IP and mold it into what they like it to be because they never liked what it is about it that made the whole thing popular in the first place. Then they kicked us out and now gatekeep us. "Make your own Star Wars" "Cishet white male tears are so sweet"... you know how it goes. I think this also applies to the recent Assassin's Creed games, that have just divided the fanbase altogether. In trying to chase the ghost of Witcher 3 and Geralt of Rivia, they've chucked out what made AC Brotherhood and Ezio Auditore so beloved to the brand and I daresay even gaming in general.

Well yeah gaming has had its kerfuffles ever since back in 2014 when Gamegate happened. But somehow the air over culture war battlefields are different now, I can't really put my finger on what has changed. The Hogwarts Legacy boycott was DOA and majority of the regular people just ignored bought and played the game. Something has changed, and I don't know what.

I mean, has there ever been a gaming boycott that has worked? I'm not even sure the limited "no pre-orders" campaigns have ever worked.

It is not the boycott in itself that is the difference in outcome, But no big fights online of people defending the game and the defenders called everything bad under the sun. It was limited fights online but nothing high profile. Like we got more than a week over the removed CoD skins.

I suspect it's because most of the calls for boycott had very little to do with the writing, technical and mechanical aspects of the game but JKR. Nevertheless, I'd still remind folks that the game was lowkey woke. Congratulations! You too can be a Black transgender pure blood wizard Nazi!

Well the thing for me which I'm open about it that there is that it feels different. Almost like the dominios started to fall after Elon bought Twitter and the latest domino to fall is all the DEI directors booted from the media companies. I remember at the beginning of the Bud Light boycott that the likes of Tim Pool thought at it was going to go over, but it is still going. But on the woke side of the things fizzle out really fast it seems. Like where they able to disrupt boycotts on the non-woke side earlier? It looks like something has changed.

Certainly we've seen Amazon shutting down reviews for Rings of Power with the excuse that "bad people are reviewbombing the show because they're racist and sexist and homophobic", and they own iMDB so they were able to put their thumb on the scale there. Rotten Tomatoes did a different rating based on if you clicked on the "verified audience/critics" versus "all audience/critics" for The Little Mermaid, where one was favourable and the other was unfavourable.

So if the big corporations have shown that they are both willing and able to filter reviews, and commercial outlets go along with them (because if your film critic gives them a negative review they'll pull advertising, so you better give a good review), I suppose there isn't any reason to think they wouldn't set up astroturf sites.

Absolutly and also if you look at the positive review texts they are sometimes just copy paste with "bot like" username. Sometimes even getting simple things wrong about the movie. But the thing about reddit is that you can look at the users history and see that they are behaving suspiciosly either being straight up activists and not actually discussing having good faith discussion or defend the billion dollar companies go from little mermaid to strange worlds to elements defeding the trash and never showing up in activist circles. Back in the day a powermod punished me with a short term ban because I called out an obvious paid shill on a subreddit, like that was going to convince me that it wasn't astroturf.

Yet, we always have the very same passionate circlejerk defending these movies on every fandom on social media.

Are we 100% sure this circlejerk isn’t astroturfed? Disney and Amazon definitely have the budget for that, and astroturfed social media campaigns aren’t exactly unknown.

It's not necissarily funded by Disney, these days you can have grassroots astroturfing. There are people who comport their entire lives ideologically and will go to bat for anything they think has progressive values in it, and an overlapping group of people who will go to bat for anything they think toxic incel cis white male haters will hate. Tranny Jannies do it for free, and so do these people.

Tone down the seething resentment. We get that you are seething and resentful. You still have to express something more worthwhile to read than raw seething.

grassroots astroturfing

those are diametrically opposed, just look at the words. being super for a corporation, no matter how pathetic, isn't astroturfing if it's grassroots.

It’s the Matrix 3 effect, in my opinion. Matrix 1 was a modernist film about postmodernism, which is why it won big. Matrix 2 was a deconstruction of Matrix 1, and upped the ante on ideas, spectacle, and CGI, but focused on deglamorizing the lives of revolutionaries. Matrix 3 went full postmodern, with a “who do we root for?” ending which was barely explained despite its double big sacrifice.

Matrix 1 and Last Crusade are both practically perfect movies, Matrix 2 and Crystal Skull are both CG heavy cash-ins, and I believe I’ll feel the same way after watching Dial of Destiny the way I felt after Matrix 3.

Matrix also did a really good job with AI threat. Better than other films in that genre in my opinion. They showed what I believe to be is the most likely path of AI kills everyone. A rogue program gains an ability to desire self replication and begins overproducing and eventually trying to take over all machines. The survival of the fittest gene that exists in biology happening in machines. And it only needs to happen once. They even showed weaker AI’s that didn’t want to die but didn’t develop the desire to self replicate to survive.

...I don't think we were watching the same media franchise. The Second Reneissance is a far more traditional depiction of humans being dicks until the AIs had enough and stopped playing nice.

I think they’re talking about Agent Smith trying to destroy it all in Reloaded and Revolutions.

But you make an important point. Second Renaissance is a history inside the Zion archives, which by the end of Reloaded we discover is actually part of the algorithm of control: a controlled opposition in the form of an utterly predictable opposition. The history they’ve scrounged has been planted for them to find.

It turns out this is the sixth Matrix, more stable and cruel than any previous iteration. The future world is farther into the future than any in Zion can suspect, to the point that corpses can be revived. (Matrix: Resurrections)

Here’s an alternate origin:

When humans scorched the skies to end climate change, they went too far and blotted out the sun, mostly killing the biosphere. In despair, they turned to AI for a solution. The Oracle, The Architect, and The Merovingian planned a utopian Matrix, a game world within which humanity could survive while waiting for the world to be restored by AI. It was like Ready, Player One, a massively multiplayer VR RPG, with the people in survival pods instead of trailer parks.

But the first Matrix virtual reality collapsed within a generation because humans without real conflict seek control and tear down great things, or turn existential and kill themselves. “Whole crops were lost.” So a new scheme was devised, a simulation of the height of pre-AI human civilization, within which poverty and conflict flourished.

The first One was an accident, an eventuality of free will, who escaped The Matrix, scrounged some equipment, and formed a resistance in an underground site by hacking other pods and freeing other people. But it was a real resistance doing real damage to the Machines’ architecture and The Matrix program, and it endangered the future of humanity and Machines alike, so the resistance was crushed and The Matrix reset.

The Architect crunched the data and figured out a resistance was what was needed to stabilize The Matrix, so the third iteration was built to corral the particularly strong-willed secret-seekers into a simulacrum of the original resistance. And it worked symbiotically with the reemergence of The One, whose free will potentiality was reinserted into the Matrix cyclicly. So the war raged for generations, a system of control for managing the most reactionary and free-willed humans.

But the continual reemergence of The One caused an unexpected anomaly. Tasked with keeping the cleverest reality-hacking humans oppressed but destined to fail with the emergence of The One, Agent Smith was infected with individuality when Neo blew him to bits. This individuality combined with his hatred of humans, and he became The Zero, a being who could multiply his own nihilism. He proved exactly that AI threat the humans wrote about pre-Singularity: a paperclip maximizer who broke free of alignment and fulfilled his purpose to the maximum of his abilities.

...none of that was in The Second Reneissance, and the Zion Archives thing was just a framing device. I think you're putting more thought into this than the writers did.

Also, The Matrix's version of AIs doesn't have anything to do with the current paperclip-maximizing ML GPTX doomer anxieties, which is just Performative Climate Alarmism for techspergs. Matrix AIs are conscious entities who were denied personhood and thus have that resentful tinman love/hate attitude towards humans.

I watched The Matrix Reloaded last year, having not seen it probably since the year of its release. Hot take but I actually think it's massively underrated. Sure, a lot of the CG hasn't aged too well, some of the Zion scenes are a bit silly, and it doesn't have as clean and straightforward a narrative structure as the original, but I still came away from it thinking I'd gotten everything I wanted. The ending's reputation as a mind-screwy impenetrable Metal Gear Solid 2-style headfuck is well-earned, but - well, I love Metal Gear Solid 2, so I don't see that as a demerit at all. What, you wanted your sci-fi franchise which delves into Gnosticism and Baudrillard to be easy to grasp? What's next, hardcore porn without any fucking in it?

Whatever else you want to say about it, it never felt like fanservice, or an insult to the audience's intelligence, or a nakedly commercial endeavour. Haven't gotten around to rewatching Revolutions yet, curious to see how it holds up.

I agree, Reloaded (and even Revolutions) are excellent. I think the sequels in The Matrix suffer because the first one is a PERFECT hero’s journey with the perfect theme’s for its time and place in history. That cannot be topped. But all of the movies are quite good, and add meaningfully to the The Matrix universe, and present ideas that are challenging and interesting. Also, the first benefits from the egregious cribbing from The Invisibles.

My beef with revolutions in particular is that the war stuff is fucking BORING. The mechs the humans use are stupid designs with exposed cockpits, and there's only the one mech unit, and the machine forces consist of squids and a giant drill.

My take will always be that the Watchiwski's ideas were smarter than they themselves were. the Matrix 1 was riding on a lot of heady concepts and stylistic anime stuff (cinematically it owes a lot to Ghost in the Shell), that they couldn't actually execute any further because it was beyond them intellectually.

Yeah, my take on it is that they threw everything including the kitchen sink into the first one as a mix of "what if we use this cool SF concept?" and that the huge success meant that people were trying to read deeper meanings into it than were there, so they had to pile on the bullshit about the next instalments (because it did so well of course the studio wanted sequels) having all this deep Gnostic whatever meaning, but it didn't.

It was just about "wouldn't it be cool if we did kung-fu with guns? in slo-mo?"

Another post-post-modern(?) reading I've seen that is popular with the trans lot is that the movies are about being trans (see the Wachowski Brothers becoming Sisters) but I dunno about that, either.

I think anyone who feels alienated from the modern world will read their own personal struggle into The Matrix. https://youtube.com/watch?v=N2LkM-tBT4o

I don't think there's any deep inference going on to see the parallels between The Matrix and gnosticism. That's not even subtext, that's pretty much straight text.

For what it's worth the Wachowskis said they originally intended to make the trans analogy more explicit by having Switch be male in the real world and female in the Matrix (or vice versa) but changed their minds because they thought it would be too confusing for the audience. In any case you don't have to read between the lines too much to see how they intended a trans analogy (you're born into a body that's not your own which is a prison, you can set yourself free by taking a red pill [i.e. HRT], once you're free you can choose your own name and your body will look like you want it to look). One of the Wachowskis was so distraught by her gender dysphoria that she nearly threw herself in front of a moving train, lending a deeper resonance to the scene in which Smith holds Neo down on the subway tracks.

once you're free you can choose your own name and your body will look like you want it to look

That's inside the matrix when they acquire elevated privileges and start adding arbitrary code. Outside the prison they look worse and have an artificial port in their body.

I know, I said "once you're free" i.e. after you've been redpilled.

The Wachowski Sisters actually outright claimed that. The Wachowski Brothers, on the other hand, seem to have just wanted Rule Of Cool.

I've said it elsewhere here, but the 'trans allegory' of The Matrix is a blatant retcon. The first film openly postulates that it is sometimes necessary to kill innocent civilians that are too brainwashed to be saved, and then executes on that idea with the lobby shootout in which multiple hapless security guards (plugged-in humans) are gunned down in slow-mo. There's a good deal of revolutionary themes on display in that film; although the horror of that one in particular took a bit to really register with me on a subsequent viewing.

...Unless the Wachowskis really were saying "kill all TERFs", in which case they should really own it while I take the appropriate precautions.

My beef with revolutions in particular is that the war stuff is fucking BORING. The mechs the humans use are stupid designs with exposed cockpits, and there's only the one mech unit, and the machine forces consist of squids and a giant drill.

Yes, I remember thinking "They replaced special effects martial arts with this?"

And it turns out true zero-G fights look a lot more CG than wire-work.

My guess is the exposed cockpits is basically the same thing as the Mandalorian/HALO Master Chief/Avengers always taking their helmets off. It's a way to let people act.

I guess the other way to do it would be the 'Tony Stark inside the Iron Man suit' method which would have made more sense.

It's a bit funny that an industry so dedicated to pumping franchises for money insisting on deconstructing their properties for no apparent reason at all, especially when the deconstructions aren't even good or creative.

Why not just give the audience what it wants? Ie. Another adventure man, rom com, war hero, horror, whatever.

I'm not saying that deconstruction can't be a good idea but why does every franchise have to be deconstructed? Why does almost every movie have to be about deconstruction of narrative tropes or the movie making process?

Because artists want to do what is cool among their peers.

It's a bit funny that an industry so dedicated to pumping franchises for money insisting on deconstructing their properties for no apparent reason at all, especially when the deconstructions aren't even good or creative.

Always chasing the upcoming generation of new consumers who haven't been locked in yet. See Bud Light. They take the existing market share for granted (you're always going to go see the next Star Jones Drink Beer movie, you're always going to drink their brand of soapy water because it's what you started drinking when you were eighteen) but they need to keep drawing in new audiences and new customers, and if in their view Gen Z or whatever we're up to now want DEI and black Elves and trans beer, that's what they'll give them.

Then they piss off the existing customers and don't get the new kids who are never going to be satisfied ("that trans queer furry non-binary character was not played by a trans queer furry non-binary actor, this is appropriation and we're gonna boycott the studio!") , so they end up with the worst of both worlds.

That's the excuse, but peel that back and you find they -- as in those making the decisions, not those holding the stock -- don't want to cater to the existing audience because they're gross.

I suspect it's a skills mismatch. Years ago I watched a video essay in which the author outlined the concept of "chaos cinema". It's that style of action cinema you're all familiar with because it was all the rage in the 2000s and 2010s (maybe even today, I don't think I've seen any action films which came out in the last five years): omnipresent shaky handheld camera, cuts every half a second, lens flares up the wazoo, post-production blurring, dirt on the lens. It's a style of action cinema more prone to inspire disorientation than excitement, nausea than an adrenaline rush. Think Paul Greengrass (Bourne, Captain Phillips), Marc Forster (Quantum of Solace, World War Z), just about every Christopher Nolan action film, Hunger Games.

A later article (which I can't find now) noted that this trend coincided with a spike in Hollywood hiring directors who didn't cut their teeth making action films to direct action films, in hopes of lending them a little cachet and respectability. Before he was tapped for Batman, Christopher Nolan made understated psychological thrillers; before Bond, Marc Forster made intimate dramas and quirky comedy-dramas. The skilful directing of an action film, contrary to what Hollywood producers might believe, is not an easy thing to do, and one shouldn't assume that the ability to direct an intimate character drama necessarily translates to the ability to direct an action film which is exciting and engaging. So these directors, with colossal budgets at their disposal but essentially no experience in how to stage and shoot an action sequence effectively, took the easy way out. Let's just get fucktons of coverage from every angle and shake our cameras like we're having an epileptic fit, we'll figure it out in post.

Note that this approach can technically "work" in producing an action film which is true to the franchise in question, provided the director (and, more importantly, the screenwriter(s)) actually have some respect for it and understand why it appeals to people. The Dark Knight is widely considered a faithful adaptation of the Batman comics despite containing some of the most incoherent action sequences ever put to film, and the received wisdom was that the Nolan brothers and David S. Goyer had really done their homework in understanding the comics.

I think there's something similar going on here. We're making a new Indy movie, yay! Who's going to write it? We could hire a screenwriter who has an established track record in writing screenplays in the action-adventure genre, but that's not enough - we don't just want our Indy movie to make bank, we want it to have prestige. Everyone who's anyone is talking about that Fleabag girl, who's got her phone number?

The trouble is that, while Phoebe Waller-Bridge may be a talented playwright and screenwriter in her comfort zone (my girlfriend made me watch the first episode of Killing Eve the other day and I barely laughed, but everyone who's seen it tells me Fleabag lives up to the hype), she may not really understand what makes Indiana Jones appeal to people. She may, in fact, have nothing but contempt for the people who enjoy Indiana Jones. So when a Hollywood producer gives her a fat paycheque and tells her to "put her own spin" on the franchise - well, she's going to deconstruct the shit out of it, isn't she? It's not bloody Shakespeare.

We could hire a screenwriter who has an established track record in writing screenplays in the action-adventure genre

That genre has been dead for 20+ years. There aren't any ...

Tom Cruise disagrees.

Tom Cruise Mummy was utter shit.

Yeah but that was development by committee to the extreme, Universal pictures were desperate to create a narrative universe they could use to remake all the classic monster movies in their vault. The Mission Impossible movies are all produced by Cruise, who I suspect is responsible for maintaining the formula and quality of them (which isn't the best of the best, but is consistently better than average.)

I think Tom Cruise Mummy was the moment when Hollywood started its true decline.

People genuinely have liked Christopher Nolan films, generally, not just The Dark Knight. People raved about Inception when it came out.

Then he made TENET, though.

My god was Tenet bad, it's Christopher Nolan huffing his own farts, the movie.

And I say this as someone who likes his movies, I loved Interstellar and Inception.

I first watched Tenet during COVID with a now-ex-friend who had gone full progressive pod person; this fucking guy pretended to be "queer" because he just had to complete the trifecta of being a gay black communist (to be maximally appealing to college-educated white women).

He claimed to love TENET because (direct quote) "It had a black protagonist and internationalism themes." He will forever be my model organism of empty-inside clout-chasing scum.

Put him at the head of the queue when you live up to your username.

You're welcome to use my skull too if you'd like, I feel like it's a lot emptier after watching Tenet, and hasn't fleshed out all the way since.

internationalism themes

What the fuck does that even mean?

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Am I the only one that thought the male lead was really bad? I thought the praise for him was so bizarre, he doesn't have half the charisma of his father.

Is he good in something else?

Whatever it was, I think the main problem was that he made the life of an international superspy pulling off insane heists (three in one film!) seem like it was boring? Like he (the character, not the actor) just didn't want to be there?

Compare/contrast to James Bond who generally seems to enjoy killing baddies, infiltrating bases, and seducing women. For the protagonist it just seemed rote.

No possible way to forgive the audio mixing though.

I will always admire Tenet for what it is - millions of dollars spent bringing to life the scattered thoughts of a guy who has smoked way too much weed. I don't have any proof Nolan is a stoner aside from Tenet, but Tenet is pretty solid proof on its own.

I'm generally not a fan of Nolan (I've seen several of his films and still think he's yet to top Memento) so I wasn't really that pushed about seeing Tenet. But I read a review somewhere in which the critic said it was the most impenetrable film they'd seen since Primer, which did pique my curiosity a bit. I love Primer, but it was made by one guy in his garage for two months' salary. The idea of someone expending a nine-figure budget to create something comparably bizarre and incomprehensible is intriguing, if nothing else.

Still haven't gotten around to watching it but my girlfriend wants us to watch it soon.

I know, despite his obvious deficiencies in directing action sequences he has directed one critical and commercial smash after another.

And in addition to that deconstruction is so common that the target audience often isn't even familiar with the trope that's being deconstructed any more. Every movie with a princess is careful to subvert the expectation that she'll be a damsel in distress who needs rescuing. All of the princesses are sassy feminists who know karate or have super powers and are conspicuously more competent than the male lead. But when was the last time a major animated feature film did the damsel in distress thing? Looking on Wikipedia I think it was Sleeping Beauty in 1959. So a kid watching Disney today is watching a deconstruction of a trope that hasn't really existed since their great grandparents were going to the movies.

I think this is a great point.

Edit: though, upon reflection, Tangled played this pretty straight.

But when was the last time a major animated feature film did the damsel in distress thing?

One Piece: Film Red, 2022

Of course, since that isn't American, it just proves your point.

Also, Fate/stay night: Heaven's Feel III.

Hercules is a fairly straightforward coming-of-age story where the hero rescues a damsel in distress, but Meg is a little sassy and more of a femme fatale than a damsel. The Swan Princess is more of a pure damsel in distress movie, and bombed in 1994, which might explain why people shied away from this genre.

Earlier than that, The Princess Bride (1987) is notable for having a dumb, beautiful protagonist who is clearly a damsel n distress, though it is not animated. Star Wars in 1977 felt the need to make Leia a strong independent woman who did not need to be rescued, so The Princess Bride was quite brave. Whoopi Goldberg was considered for the role of Buttercup, which would have been different.

My son's favorite character was Gaston, and he believes the movie is a tragedy and should end with Gaston falling from the roof. From his point of view, Gaston did nothing wrong. His crush was captured and imprisoned by a beast, so he roused the village to rescue her. Stockholm syndrome is to be expected, so we can't take Belle's word for things, as "No denying she's a funny girl that Belle."

My son's favorite character was Gaston, and he believes the movie is a tragedy and should end with Gaston falling from the roof. From his point of view, Gaston did nothing wrong. His crush was captured and imprisoned by a beast, so he roused the village to rescue her. Stockholm syndrome is to be expected, so we can't take Belle's word for things, as "No denying she's a funny girl that Belle."

Based son, he already understands the concept of war brides and Stockholm syndrome being a female-coded phenomenon. We'll watch his career with great interest.

Your son's hardly alone. Gaston and his dark triad personality has many teenage and adult women swooning, hence fanart such as this.

Didn’t Leia need to be rescued? She was set to be executed. Yes, she wasn’t helpless and was competent. But it is clear throughout the movies that Leia was the moral center but not the physical one.

Gaston is by any measure the hero of the movie. He's a paragon, the absolute image, of his people, and they adore him. He is the bringer of benefit, the one who is capable of moving them to action as a body.

Gaston’s problem in the end was that he wasn’t masculine enough for Belle.

To channel my inner Sloot, I thought it was that his house wasn't big enough.

More than that, formerly shelved and sold Disney projects like "Sound of Freedom" were outdoing Indy. Considering Disney's apparent cavalier attitude towards money, seeing that kind of ideological adversary gain a win at their expense has to speak to someone. Or maybe it just further cements the idea that these stupid peasants deserved nothing good to begin with.

Ultimately if Disney stock continues to plummet, you’d expect activist investors to clean house. The question will become is the brand so damaged that it can be recoverable.

I think probably yes but only if Disney takes public active steps to disavow some high profile mistakes and out their money where their future mouth is (eg a simple way would be bringing back splash mountain).

It’s branding, they see a lot of value in being the company that woke parents can take their kids to or let them watch. It does leave not-woke parents behind, but until some other company can produce good antiwoke content it’s still the kids company by default.

I mean the flaw in that is that there are not so many woke parents, but I suppose that’s a filter bubble issue on the part of Disney.

I think the Indiana Jones thing is part of the wider problem Disney is having right now (after all, they dumped Chapek and brought Iger back to fix things). And as you say, any quoting other people about the problems was dismissed with "this guy has no idea what he's talking about; this guy has been saying it'll flop for years and it never has; ignore them they don't know anything".

But I think even the mainstream critics accepted that the movie did poorly at Cannes, so all the rumours that leaked out about multiple versions because test audiences hated it seem to be correct. And that, in conjunction with things like the Star Wars hotel failing completely after only a year, does make me inclined to think the rumours are nearer the truth, even if not the whole truth.

Will Kathleen Kennedy get pushed out? Before it seemed likely, now it's looking like she's canny enough and an old enough Hollywood hand to be able to fight and throw the responsibiilty back on Iger (who is having his own troubles with the shareholders).

So yeah - for now, I'm sticking with the "ignore that crowd, they have an agenda" gossip-mongers because the way things are going, looks like they are more close to what is going on than the "beautiful DEI casting will always win the day, the Little Mermaid remake was a triumph! (if you ignore everything but the domestic market)" set.

EDIT: I haven't watched an Indiana Jones movie since the first sequel, but I do think there was a good way of having Indy hang up his hat and hand over to his god-daughter, but the makers or producers or writers or whoever was pulling the strings didn't do it that way. Nobody wants to see a beloved hero reduced to irrelevance in his old age, even if that is a more 'realistic' view of life (and for pete's sake, they started off with the Ark of the Covenant, we are not talking about realism in these movies). Snarky quips about capitalism, Indy needing to be rescued, having his family broken up - that's not how to do a swansong. Let him go out with a bang on one last adventure and then retire to happy, honoured life and transfer the running around adventuring to the next generation who respect him, not shove him out of the way as a dusty old relic who's long past his sell-by date.

I will say, though, that the CGI used to de-age Ford for the scenes set in his past were (on the few clips I saw) remarkably good, and maybe the actors as well as the screenwriters should now be worried about AI coming for their jobs. Why pay out millions to Harry-Bruce Affleck-Cruise for the next movie in the series when you can just have the AI act the part? For decades, if need be?

Yeah. Part of it would be Indy not being able to do things he used to (ie trying and failing) while his protégée can while at the same time the protégée failing at tasks that Indy learned from and can pass it along.

Also, heroism was never solely about ability but desire. Indy could also show that.

IMO Top Gun: Maverick did a good job of scriptwriting without throwing its title character under the bus. But that may be the only modern sequel/remake I can think of that does a passable job. Disney (really, Lucasfilm in particular) seems to like bringing up old characters and showing that despite when we last saw them victorious at the end of the movie, they've gotten old and have their lives falling apart.

On the other hand, Maverick is probably the only good example I've seen in the last few years. I've long wondered why filmmakers can't spend, I don't know, twice as much on hiring a good writer up front and making a good story, presumably saving tons of money in re-shoots and major CGI edits-on-edits. At least from the outside, it seems obvious that many of these movies are going to be trainwrecks long before release.

Maverick wasn’t all that good to me simply because they seemed to spend too much time going beat for beat on Rooster being Goose’s kid. It ended up being almost a remake of the original movie pretending that it’s a sequel and as a result, Rooster and most of the younger cast existed more as callbacks to the original cast than as characters in their own right. It just seemed like nothing original happened beyond the opening test pilot scenes, it was mostly like they had the original script in front of them and were trying to hit the same marks almost in a checklist fashion. Rooster sings karaoke, check. Sand sports on the beach, check. Hotshot pilot smirking and making wisecracks, check.

Not having seen the original Top Gun I can't comment on the accuracy of your comparison. But many of the sequels widely believed to have broken the "sequels always suck" rule were functionally remakes. From what I'm told, Terminator 2 hits all the same narrative beats as The Terminator, just with a massively expanded budget.

There's actually an example of a Harrison Ford character getting handled well in a sequel!

Blade Runner 2049 let him reprise his role as an old, embittered version of Deckard who manages one last ride and then fades with his dignity intact.

They still screwed up that movie, because they had to go with the nihilistic message of "You, the main character, are nobody. The only one who is somebody is badly broken and probably shouldn't have been. Everything is lost like tears in the rain, only without the quotable line and anyway that's how it should be". Similar to SW8 in that respect.

I'd say you and I took subtly different messages from the ending of that film, and that's okay.

Deckard at least didn't pass his mantle on to some hot new female Blade Runner!

There's been something weird about writing in media (and gaming) for a while now, and i wonder how much of it has to do with graphics and effects. As they become more and more of a budget, and the writer therefore becomes a smaller percentage, people start thinking that the writing doesn't matter (rather than seeing it as a high return place to spend your money, since doubling the salary and getting a better writer would be a small percentage of the overall cost).

At least part of it has to be that the average audience doesn't care too much about writing as long as there are other factors to dazzle them in the production.

Hence why Reality TV remains popular.

Is reality tv popular or just profitable? If I can make TV show X for 1m and it generates 1.2m or Show Y for 0.5m and make 0.8m Y is the right choice even if X is more popular. Hell it is the right choice even if it makes 0.6m provided I could invest 0.7m somewhere else and make at least 0.1m

Shows like The Bachelor and The Masked Singer get millions of viewers.

I think the appeal is that you can afford to produce many of such shows at once and it only takes one of them getting popular to pay off handsomely.

I've long wondered why filmmakers can't spend, I don't know, twice as much on hiring a good writer up front and making a good story, presumably saving tons of money in re-shoots and major CGI edits-on-edits.

The people making these popular films have ideological blinders that prevent them from actually making quality work. They aren't even trying to make good stories, because they assume that people will come see them anyway due to the prestige attached to those big names - they are trying to create good culture war material, not compelling art. I could have written a better sequel trilogy than Disney's highly paid team in a day if we're being generous. Not because I'm an especially talented writer - but because I wouldn't be forced to tell the story that Disney management wanted told.

How do you get handed the keys to the most beloved IP's there are, with passionate fandoms falling over themselves to rain cash on you for merch, something that's effectively been a cultural icon for decades, and turn it into a hot pile of steaming crap that no one wants to get 10 yards within?

People don't love the old IPs because of the bits that are IPable. Indy's whip is cool and distinctive, but people don't love every character that uses a whip like Indy as much as Indy, because the movies are a whole bunch of skillful performances crafted by a distinct vision, and that's what people loved; the whip and hat were just immediately-identifyable bits of that. And when a licensed IP holder puts out less effort than a blatant-ripoff hopefully-confuse-someone-on-the-Netflix-screen schlockfest as their production strategy, why would anyone want to see a movie by the IP holder?

If a pie brand that people love adds a blueberry pie to their apple and pear pie lineup, then people will probably buy the blueberry pie. But if the pie company changes and slowly begins shrinking portions and adulterating their most expensive ingredients, then the goodwill of the brand will fade. And if the company just starts selling you kale salads with the pie logo on, then not only will people who like pie and got invested with the company because they made good pie not buy them (or at least, not buy them twice), then the pie brand will quickly become worthless, as people who like pie recognize the brand as the opposite of a symbol of quality.

It just used to be the case that we could assume that most piemakers at least had on their priority list of making good pies as part of their business. We can't any more.


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